Delivering silo'ed applications through a single interface

I was visiting with a customer today who was looking at technology to help improve their business processes and provide a single web interface to their various applications for various different types of end users. This is a very common problem and I see it all too often when talking with customers. Today a customer has a variety of separate, silo'ed applications that over time require information to be shared between them. In order to facilitate this, each of the interfaces have had to be programmed to extract data from each of the back ends. This results in a spaghetti string implementation which becomes extremely hard to manage. In addition, when simple changes are required from an end user perspective the heavy hitters in IT have to be involved to help code these changes not only within the various end user applications, but to each of the back ends that are involved. The 'spaghetti' strings have to be untangled and changes can take an enormous amount of time and resources to implement. The goodness of a SOA (services oriented architecture) ties a single web interface through a 'middleware' layer which eliminates the spaghetti approach and allows for a single layer to manage the connections and requests from each of the backend systems and deliver them as services (or specific application functions) to the glass layer.


Not only can these services be reused, but you can deliver multiple application functions (or services) together in one screen through the use of 'portlets/wigets' (pick your term) allows the ability to quickly create a valuable application at the glass layer vs. having to do the heavy lifting on the back end. Imagine if you will that you wanted to have a holistic view of one of your customers. You want to view their order history, call history, informational data about the customer, all the contacts you have at that location and anything else you can imagine. Ask yourself, how many applications do I need to launch and individually work with in order to view all that information and how much time for your employees to find that information. The idea is that you provide "portlets" that view into each of the systems where this information lives and "wire" them together at the glass level so when you take action in one portlet, the rest are updated dynamically based on a key (such as a customer name). This also affords companies is the ability to reuse these assets with other business processes which makes applications more aligned with what the business process is vs. what the systems make it to be. Specifically, not only can the services be reused, but users don't care where the information lives or how to learn each of the applications work, they use a single web interface to access an application that works at the glass level and displays information from each of the disparate applications in a single view for your employee, supplier, or customers. This also affords companies the ability to slip in new application functionality when it is ready to the end users without re-training which increases application adoption rates. Leverage and expose your investments in the applications and systems you have today!

This begs the question, how hard is it to create portlets/widgets (etc.) to build these composite applications. Well, the answer is threefold; 1.) There are lots of portlets that already exist already that call and display information from many different back end applications. These are available from IBM and application vendors. 2.) For specific industries there are many partners in the eco-system that provide 'accelerator' packages for a portal that provide sets of portlets for specific industry solutions such as; claims processing. 3.) Development tools are available that already have the connections to back-end systems built, and you define what you want the portlet to display through a form based interface. In addition, there are java tools that allow you to create portlets from scratch if you so desire.

So, all in all, this is a brain dump of the conversations that I had today and I thought it was worth capturing and sharing. I would love to hear opinions and have discussions on this topic.....