CRM Takes on Process Integration

by Bruce Silver

One of the supreme ironies of last year's AIIM/Gartner user survey is that while virtually every company polled claimed to be using workflow to automate key business processes, so-called workflow vendors were starving. That's because workflow has become less a tool for interapplication integration than an embedded feature of individual enterprise applications, like Siebel or SAP.

The success of these monolithic, packaged applications is itself a direct result of the difficulty of custom application integration using tools like workflow. Many CIOs have judged it easier to change their business processes to fit the CRM and ERP packages than to try to integrate the menagerie of disparate systems spread across their front or back offices.

The big advantage of a packaged application or suite is that it provides a common set of data objects applicable across all its functions. At the level of basic business data, it is pre-integrated out of the box. Because of that pre-integration, the application can embed a framework for business process management, including business rules and task sequencing, within the context of the application. It is that framework, rather than dedicated cross-application process modeling and execution engines, that has come to define the term "workflow" for most business users today.

But now that the build-outs of CRM and ERP are largely complete, it is the enterprise application vendors that are taking a pounding from their customers over the difficulty and costs of integrating other applications. Gartner estimates that a full 30 percent of the implementation cost of an enterprise application goes to integrating external apps. It's not a matter of simply connecting the CRM system to the ERP system. The typical organization has 50 major applications running in its IT environment, including many custom and legacy systems. Enterprise business processes are not confined to a single app, but thread their way among many. It goes back to the traditional workflow argument: Some kind of external process integration middleware is still needed.

The middleware solution that has taken center stage is based on the integration broker concept. Integration brokers, from vendors like Tibco, SeeBeyond, webMethods, Vitria and IBM provide application adapters that monitor data changes in enterprise applications, publishing "events" for each change that meet some specified criteria. Other applications connected to the broker can "subscribe" to particular events. Upon receiving the event, the integration broker gathers specified data elements from the source application adapter, transforms them as needed and passes them to the subscribing application. Originally designed simply for data synchronization — if the customer's address changes in the CRM system, update the address in the ERP system, and vice versa — integration brokers now are offering business process integration, including prepackaged process maps: If the inventory drops below x, initiate the reorder process automatically.

Business process management is now generally seen as the amalgamation of three groups of historically distinct types of middleware: workflow (focused on human interaction), EAI (integration brokers for application-to-application links) and B2B (EDI and its internet/XML successors). But will key business processes really be modeled and managed using middleware — tools traditionally oriented to programmers? History has shown that as technologies move out of the early adopter stage, applications ultimately trump middleware. Clearly, there will be a role for application vendors in determining the course of business process management.

Siebel's recent Universal Application Network (UAN) announcement is the first standards-based integration framework to come from the application side. In the UAN vision, the integration suite vendors would still provide the adapters, integration brokers and process engine functionality, but the process modeling tools — including visual flow maps, representations of error conditions, transactional boundaries, compensating transactions, and data transformations — would come from the application vendor (meaning Siebel).

Essentially, Siebel is taking its extensive suite of CRM functionality, including rich business objects and prepackaged process flows, and rewrapping it for enterprise business process integration. What makes this a universal, "vendor-independent" architecture is its reliance on XML Web services technology and standards. Process models will use Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), an IBM-proposed process description language that has the backing of most integration vendors. Business objects are represented by XML Schema descriptions, and data transformations use XSLT mappings. Process and data models and mappings created using Siebel's Business Process Designer are independent of both the underlying applications and the integration server. Other application vendors could provide their own business objects and process models using these standards, although none so far have announced plans to do so.

While UAN would appear to represent a major shift of functionality out of the hands of the middleware providers over to the application side, all the leading integration suite vendors have signed on enthusiastically as partners, and are accelerating their plans to support the Siebel framework.

The reason is clear: Middleware is abstract and developer-oriented, and the new e-business infrastructure has become so technically complex that IT is having trouble engaging the business side in the conversation. Applications, on the other hand, are concrete, understandable to business analysts and management. Making process integration an extension of enterprise applications rather than a new layer of infrastructure thus has natural appeal. While the early action will center around middleware, business process management could ultimately become just another application feature.

Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA, 831-685-8803. Reports are available at www.brsilver.com.