Enterprise SOA

What will the shift to a model-driven world mean for IT, and where will these business analysts come from?

What sets ESA apart from vanilla SOAs is its inclusion of a semantic business language expressed through enterprise services—and, more important, how these are mapped to real business processes—in the form of models. Modeling is the organizing principle of ESA; model-driven development tools will create composite applications that business analysts can build and rebuild, and these business analysts will lead the cultural shift away from siloed corporate hierarchies and toward a corporate organization aligned along business processes. When we say ESA will transform your culture, we're really talking about the change in perception stemming from the dominance of the modeling metaphor focused on processes.

Modeling tools such as SAP Visual Composer are already used to hide complexity and simplify developers' choices when composing new UIs. Other tools also are available for high-level business processes (ARIS models from IDS Scheer), for frontend, conversational, user-centric business processes (guided procedures), for backend business processes (SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure's Cross Component Business Process Management), and for configuring business processes (SAP Solution Manager). Various abstraction layers such as Web Dynpro provide more detailed representations of an abstract UI that can be used by modeling tools. As we explain in more detail in Chapter 4, modeling ...