Realizing e-business with Components (Component Based Development Series) (Hardcover)

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What this book is about

 Unfortunately, there is a great deal of hype and over-expectation surrounding e-business. Many organizations are jumping on the e-business bandwagon without understanding what they are getting into. Lack of planning and analysis, resulting in inflexible solutions that are unable to integrate with existing systems, are all too common. At the same time, e-business calls for a closer relationship between those involved in business development and those required to support these initiatives within the company's information technology infrastructure.  This book is designed to provide practical advice for planning, analysis and design of e-business systems using component-based development (CBD). Just as e-business is more than a series of web pages, so CBD is not just an approach to problem solving using software building blocks. It includes architectures, processes, modeling techniques, economic models and organizational guidelines, all of which are well placed to ease migration of large organizations to e-business.  The book is long on practice and short on theory. Theory is included where relevant to practical problems. The core of the book is an extensive example that tracks the experiences of a typical company, with a traditional set of business processes and supporting software systems, through various stages along the road to e-business.

Who should read this book

 This book is primarily intended for IT planners, architects, analysts and designers responsible for e-business solutions in large organizations. Equally it is aimed at business strategists, business process engineers and business architects. More significantly, this book is aimed at the new breeds of individual that are emerging, as the dividing lines between business and software grow increasingly blurred.  More broadly the book is intended for anyone interested in modeling business components. In particular, it is hoped that the increasing number of business component and framework vendors will benefit from the increased understanding that clear and precise component models provide of their products to their customers.

How to read this book

 Naturally I would prefer it if you read the book cover to cover. However, with the exception of Chapter 6, which should be read after reading Chapter 5, each chapter of this book can be read individually and readers with specific interests can go straight to the subject of their choice. For those who are not familiar with component-based modeling techniques, it is important to refer to Appendix 2 for guidance. There are four parts to the book as follows.

First we set the scene and explain underlying principles

 Chapter 1 introduces the need for a component-based approach to e-business systems, explains the basic principles of the approach and sets the emphasis on planning, analysis and business integration.  Chapter 2 looks at how to align e-business software development within the context of the organization's business goals and objectives.  Chapter 3 shows how to integrate business needs into a clearly defined component architecture.  Chapter 4 describes a truly component-based process framework and guidelines for dealing with these issues and to assist with planning and control of CBD for e-business.

Next we come to the core of the book: a continuous practical case study

 Chapter 5 provides a practical case study of how to apply a component-based approach to e-business in an organization migrating to e-business, but wanting to protect and utilize its investments in existing systems.  Chapter 6 continues the case study and considers how to evolve the early solutions extending the scope to full business process integration and on to business transformation.

Third, we describe three key supporting strategies:
provisioning, funding and team organization

 Chapter 7 looks at how components are provisioned and considers a range of different options including framework extension, wrapping, adapting, outsourcing, purchasing and bespoke design.  Chapter 8 describes tactical measures for funding component-based projects and provides metrics and costing criteria before considering how to identify benefits in the context of e-business.  Chapter 9 centers on team roles, providing guidance for projects at various stages along the road to e-business using components and considers how to use the roles to structure teams based on different organizational needs.

Finally, the appendices provide essential supporting information

 Appendix 1 provides short descriptions of component and Internet standards and typical accompanying physical architectures.  Appendix 2 provides a catalogue of component modeling techniques. The purpose is not to describe a complete definitive methodology, but to establish just enough semantics and notation with hints and tips to guide the reader.

From the Author
A condensed guide to Realizing e-Business with Components.
The brave new world of e-business is commonly associated with highly developed technical skills, ranging from Java programming to Internet standards. What’s less well appreciated is that e-business systems also require the ability to tackle new kinds of business problems and raise the bar for today’s IT (Information Technology) departments, in terms of architecture, planning, analysis and communication skills. Software anarchy is not an option.

Component-based development (CBD) is well positioned to help. Much effort and progress has been made in the provisioning and deployment areas of CBD. In fact many people who claim to be "doing CBD" are actually practising component-based implementation not component-based analysis. Much less progress has been made in business-IT alignment, architectures, analysis and design techniques and enabling strategies. It is to these areas that most of this book is addressed. Here are some thoughts on how I tried to achieve this.

E-Business systems require a progression away from point driven design and development processes toward processes that integrate e-business improvement with architecture planning, component provisioning and solution delivery. I did not want to create a methodology. Ultimately this would just sit on a shelf. I wanted to reflect my project experiences in a distilled roadmap that folks would find useful. So that’s what I tried to do, with the minimum of noise. I have tried to provide a change management framework that recognises there are fundamental and graduated changes that organisations need to make to progress.

Many folk out there have broken their wings on the top-heavy modelling and academic theory that flies in the face of commercial realities. I have tried to de-mystify some of these cans of worms and keep things as simple as possible. At the same time I have introduced two things that are sadly missing from many of the so-called CBD methods - interfaces and architecture. While sticking with popular techniques that work (like interaction modelling) I have provided a lot of new guidance on techniques like interface and architecture modelling. I’ve done this both in the examples that form the core of the book and in an appendix that provides a quick reference catalogue. Not many books around that have done that with a blow by blow illustration showing the realities of everyday life, rather than academic models in an ivory tower.

I have aimed at pragmatic advice that allows you to evolve a component architecture on the back of practical software delivery. This is whole point with e-business systems. Not only that, but I have based the architecture on a component metamodel that fills a need in the key area of component definition (still a key topic, if not so fashionable these days). This is the Cheesman/Daniels metamodel that I believe represents a major step forward and is described in their book UML Components (also part of this series). Closely related to that are interface specifications and component specifications - there are lots of guidelines there with advice that will be new to many.

A major factor that organisations are struggling to make headway with, especially with regard to e-business systems, is that they have woefully inadequate enabling strategies; for example component provisioning, funding and team organisation. I have included chapters to raise awareness that component provisioning is more than simply buying an application server framework or shrink wrapped component; that provide practical tips on funding; and that equip managers with useful ideas for organising teams for e-business. The enabling strategies dovetail with the architecture, process and techniques described earlier in the book. My hope is that even the most talented project managers will find these guidelines find helpful.

Finally, I have eschewed unnecessary technical details as I wanted to focus mainly on the business-IT alignment issues and guidelines that are necessary for advancing with e-business. However a lot of these issues are complex and tangled with analysis and architecture issues so I tried to expose these, while keeping the book very condensed and ultimately short - that was the thing I was most pleased with! Hopefully it's a book that people might actually read rather than file on a shelf to look good. (By the way, there is an appendix on relevant technologies - a nice primer for the non-nerd).

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2 Reviews 5 star:  (1) 4 star:  (1) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars A very good, practical book, 11 April 2002 By  A. K. Johnston "(www.andrewj.com/books)" (LEATHERHEAD United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)       This is a very good, practical book. I found it very readable, with just an appropriate level of textual detail in most cases. It's the first book I read which tries to tackle the problem of modelling and understanding Enterprise-level system interactions (this predated Tony Britton's excellent book). If anything, Paul sells it a bit short by tying it to "e-Business", since a lot of the ideas and disciplines can apply to less forward-looking Enterprises who are trying to solve traditional integration problems but who may not identify with the e-Business tag. The early part of the book discusses the principles of component-based development (CBD), and how this can be combined with process modelling to both help improve the business, and to provide a clear model for the systems needed to support it. Importantly, Paul sees the development of both business processes and systems as something which must happen progressively, so neither has to be the subject of "big bang" changes. The next section of the book discusses the different types of components, and their role in a typical architecture comprised of both new and legacy systems. Paul then introduces his "CBD Process Framework", a way of defining components and then "provisioning" then by the most appropriate combination of new development, purchasing and re-using existing assets. The core of the book takes a typical business process (car rental) and develops a worked example of the various business, logical and physical models which are required to define the component architecture. The models are each taken through several stages, corresponding to an evolving e-Business process and a system which is growing incrementally. This is much more realistic than presenting the final model "as is", and allows much better understanding of how the model develops. In many ways this is the part of the book which delivers the greatest real value. The final part of the book discusses different provisioning and funding strategies for CBD, and how an e-Business team should be structured. There's a lot of good stuff here, which may be very useful to someone new to object- and component-based development. However if I'm honest I found this less useful, since there are better specialist books on this subject and it doesn't hold the interest as well as some of the earlier sections. As an Appendix, Paul presents descriptions of all the major component technologies, and all the major UML-based modelling techniques. This could be a valuable reference for anyone. I have one slight reservation on the book's core - Paul follows a convention in which an "interface" is a collection of types, and says that "by convention" the interface includes access to all the types. This is a bit different to the Microsoft model, for example, and may make it more difficult to establish good navigation around the object model, or to support "stateless" models. However, this is something to be aware of rather than something which should detract from what is otherwise a very useful tutorial. I like this book. The worked examples of developing the e-Business model are excellent, so much so that I now recommend this book to anyone trying to model such things using UML. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   0 of 1 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars This book is good, 2 Dec 2000 By  rgriffin@aol.com (Ireland) - See all my reviews It is well worth its money and is the beat eBusiness book i have read. It gives clear information about ebusiness. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 2 customer reviews...		Ad feedback   Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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