DESIGNING A LONG-TERM INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE FOR PROVISIONING TNC May 2007, Copenhagen Aida Omerovic Scientist & project manager – UNINETT FAS, NORWAY

2 -- Best practices from building architecture of an enterprise integration platform for provisioning in heterogeneous, distributed systems

3 Business model Serving Norwegian higher education sector; an integrated part of NREN Expertise in integration, security, standardization, development/operation, contracting, deployment etc. Contributing to innovation and excellence Extensible initiatives - too demanding for individual organizations but feasible and cost-effective with joint effort and shared resources Significant savings, improvement of service level, new use areas, deliverables and demands

4 Background Provisioning: what and why? Objective: efficient, dependable collaboration of systems and users A set of large scale, software intensive and security critical systems Distributed, decentralised, heterogeneous applications Synergies in terms of value chain improvement and new services from system interactions A “system of systems” offering more than the sum of the individual applications

5 Provisioning architecture in a cross- organisational environment

6 The architectural layers

7 Dataflow within the integration platform Functional examples of the dataflow Contents of data for provisioning Metadata consensuses. Handling, mapping and dissemination of metadata. Optimization of the workflow Support and enhancement of the value chain

8 Important aspects Modelling (working processes, dataflow) Risk analysis, simulation Security measures (a practical approach based standards, models and risk analysis and covering the entire set of interacting systems/components) Timely revisions upon changes Documentation Quality criteria of the platform Interoperability, maintainability and extensibility Maintenance of quality through monitoring Deduction of metrics

9 General experiences Beneficial to have full control over the integration architecture Consistent interfaces, maintainable interactions, reusable and portable services, optimized dataflow The critical success factors Compliance to standards, modularity and dynamic configuration Data quality

10 An exemplar use scenario Service supplier: Reveal needs Design, risk analysis, test plans Implement interfaces on architecture and application Extend services within architecture for the new interfaces Documentation, in-house testing Piloting Information Institution-service supplier Legal agreements Configuration Interface validation (transfer, syntax, semantics) Testing Deployment and user education

11 An exemplar use scenario cont. HR/student administrative system-> user administration system- >provisioning architecture ->dissemination to a set of admin. Systems One vs. multitude of messages, contents Location of operational environments Provisioning of user data into a set of applications: accounting system users, employees, catalog users and archiving system end users: Supply the data from the authoritative systems into the UAS Identify data sources and destinations Identify conditions on the processes Verify syntax, semantics, transfer mechanisms, security measures and frequency Test Develop and document routines, policies Deploy An exemplar scheema for incoming interface, deduced from IMS:

12 An exemplar building block: externally available syntax and semantics validation service Standardised interfaces Service specific rules Dynamic, extensible rules Used by customer organisations and vendors for validation, development and testing Multi-level checking and reporting User-friendly and reliable format -and contents analysis

13 Conclusions A centralized integration architecture is a necessity when enabling interactions between distributed applications with heterogeneous technologies or between distributed organizations A balance has to be made between the functional needs and the technical choices The architecture includes a variety of built in, transformable and mutually compatible, interfaces. The paper focuses on the scientific, mainly design-related, issues of developing a cross-organizational provisioning architecture, which supports an overall modeled or assumed optimal workflow at any time. This is a toolbox to be used pragmatically, with best effort, but there is no “silver bullet”!

14 Questions/comments? Thank you!