SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
In Association with Business Process Integration
Vikas S Shah
Sortes Technologies Inc., #902, 10 Lisa Street, Brampton, ON L6T4N4, Canada
Keywords: Business Process Integration (BPI), Content Management, Enterprise Modelling, Real-time Enterprises,
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Abstract: Organization’s distributed and evolving enterprises demands an integrated approach providing consolidated
control and secure information sharing among users and applications in support of business processes.
Businesses faced considerable challenges due to unawareness of setting an integration infrastructure with
specific business context. Recent industry trend is inclined to investigate rapid and cost effective BPI
platform with indisputable business benefits in terms of Real-Time Enterprise Content Management (RT-
ECM). RT-ECM ensures consistency among users and infrastructure. The perception also provides secure
access to necessary and valid content in real-time. Modern RT-ECM architectures are focused to assist
content sharing across multiple resources as well as enterprise applications. SOA, a distributed computing
environment, is poised at the intersection of business and technology. SOA enables enterprises to
seamlessly and rapidly adapting altering environment. Service-Oriented RT-ECM approach offers
integration specific, flexible, and featured BPI platform. The contribution of this paper is an RT-ECM
architecture framework illustrating most prominent technical challenges during establishment of business
process perceptive integration and time sensitive content flow management. Real-time content management
engines, business process engines, and service provisioning are at the centre of presented framework.
Initiative behind the research effort is to capture and estimate generic aspects of BPI such that organizations
may exclusively focus on unique business characteristic. Eventually, the paper discusses advantages and
consequences of service oriented RT-ECM besides outstanding issues for further research.
1 INTRODUCTION
Enterprises competitiveness is creating necessity to
rapidly streamline business processes results in
generating novel business values and increase
operational efficiencies. Ever since organization’s
business requirements emerge, evolve, and mature,
the former enterprise systems are becoming
incapable of dealing with business transformations.
Apparently, enterprises must have the control of
business logic into the integration processes in order
to deal with the pressure of today's dynamic business
environment. Enterprises must respond with
innovative ways to attract as well as retain
customers (or partners) and achieve greater visibility
into business processes.
BPI is the key ability of an enterprise to respond
efficiently to leverage business changes offering
competitive advantages. However, ability for
businesses to incorporate and react to changes is
hampered in many instances by ECM. ECM poses
an agility barrier on BPI (Buco M J. et al., 2005) due
to composition of enterprises with wide range of
technologies implemented by means of disparate
resources. Capability to assist organizations to
narrow the scope of integration and focus on specific
business objectives has become an increasingly
motivating issue for BPI vendors in recent years
(Deshpande, 2004).
BPI fosters an approach to serve most significant
business requests through correlating enterprise
contents with business processes. BPI platform
articulates exactly the way each process must
provision. It ensures execution of processes aligning
to satisfy business objectives. The enterprise
software development team can gradually drills
down to the specific implementation detail such as
connecting to the various subsystems that may
execute the functionality in each step of the process.
541
S Shah V. (2007).
SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT - In Association with Business Process Integration.
In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 541-549
DOI: 10.5220/0002373305410549
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

It requires identifying the specific content element
that must be referred at runtime. Only relevant
content pertaining to the processes is being
automated. BPI promotes incremental Return-on-
Investment (ROI) sanctioning enterprises to break
up large problems into more manageable entities
with right information at the right time.
Traditional approaches to build BPI and resolve
the needs of distributed enterprise architecture
incorporates relatively brittle coupling between
various components (Leune, 2004). The infirmity of
enterprises becomes a crisis as the scale, demand,
volume, and rate of business change increases.
Unavailability of relevant content, lack of time to
market, inability to rapid transformation to business
opportunities as well as competition (Sheth A. et al.,
2002) are the characteristics of present enterprise
architecture framework. Hence there is a growing
realization to replace the present deficient ECM
model with more flexible architecture approaches
yielding enterprises for further amenable to business
revolution.
The revolutionary approaches to develop RT-
ECM platform archives the goal by providing
diverse content management methodologies, process
establishments, and system integration functions.
We have presented enterprise architecture
framework managing business process modelling
and service oriented content flow aspects of RT-
ECM. The target is to grip the generic aspects of
process integration such that it may focus exclusive
to the unique business needs. The major components
of RT-ECM are real-time content management
engine, business process engine, and service
provisioning.
RT-ECM platform is generally implemented in
the course of acquiring commercial software
packages and customizing them to convene the
organization’s business requirements (Turner M. et
al., 2004). SOA facilitates the subsequent phases of
business process evolution from merely automated
to manage flexibility. The service oriented real-time
content flow management aspects of BPI lacks
empirical research. This paper explores the concepts
of SOA based RT-ECM. It also identifies issues
when operating the proposed model in conjunction
with actual industry based BPI platform. The
benchmark criterion presented reflects characteristic
of typical SOA based RT-ECM in relation to
integration, usability, and functional adaptation.
The paper represents the relationship between
SOA based RT-ECM and BPI. Section 2 provides an
overview of mandatory requirements to introduce
SOA within existing BPI. Section 3 addresses issues
of building efficient RT-ECM architecture
framework. Section 4 discusses implications of SOA
to develop RT-ECM platform elaborating our
approach. Section 5 brief the benchmark to evaluate
effectiveness of proposed SOA based RT-ECM with
set of business criteria to be measured. Section 6
presents our observation with industry specific case
studies justifying the perception and advantages.
Section 7 is dedicated to conclusion as well as
further research.
2 STRATEGIC ALLIANCE OF
SOA AND BPI – ESSENTIAL
REQUIREMENTS
Combination of SOA and BPI is more powerful than
either is in itself. Services are joined together to
arrive at a composite business process. SOA
minimizes the gap between business analysis and IT
development work. Business processes and contents
are considered and designed simultaneously due to
access of applications and corresponding
information. Figure 1 indicates that the services
layer consists of line of services that are aligned to a
particular business domain. Reusable nature of
defined services can be shared across multiple
business domains.
Figure 1: Relation between Business Processes and
Service Layer.
Viewpoint is a well recognized architectural
concept to describe the audience and concern of
particular description (Caron, 2006). BPI might be
called the ‘Process Viewpoint’ and SOA the
‘Service Viewpoint’. The process viewpoint is
concerned with the overall end-to-end lifetime of a
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542

business process. The business process is concerned
with combining individual activities. It is also
responsible for executing, managing and monitoring
the current state, progress and performance of the
entire process. The service viewpoint is concerned
with the collection of services that are available to
the processes. It identifies the method in which
process is being constructed, organized, provisioned,
managed, and maintained irrespective to the specific
utilization of the process.
The synergy of SOA must provide a solution to
how services are designed, utilized, and combined to
meet the requirements of BPI that facilitates
traversing the organizational boundaries of
consumers and providers. SOA presents a detailed
definition of what a service is and how it uses the
SOA infrastructure. It also ensures that independent
services can be combined together in business
processes through identifying interfaces a service is
required to present, service contract semantics,
service registration and discovery methodologies,
service level agreements (SLAs), and all aspects of a
service lifecycle. Following are the primary criteria
for SOA to support BPI.
• Shared Information and Semantics - Information
in the services needs to be conform to the
enterprise information model and semantics. SOA
must consider a transformation between the
enterprise semantics and the internal information
model ensuring seamless integration with existing
ECM.
• Application Integration – The legacy system
capabilities and content needs to be service
enabled such that they can be included into new
BPI platform. Services need to map from the
enterprise model to the application model as part
of the integration and not imposing the legacy
model on the business processes. SOA exposes
functions and associated contents as services
exhibiting all important service characteristics
(such as contract or discovery). SOA must treat
integration services differently than business
services.
• Service Reuse and Governance - The process
designers requires identifying set of available
services to ensure that they perform necessary
functions before including services in the
respective business processes. The producers of
services need to determine that a similar service
isn’t already offered to understand the boundaries
of the role and responsibility of new services
avoiding creation of redundancy and overlap. The
SOA platform must provide a design time service
repository that supports the discovery and
examination of services during the design of
business processes distinguishing from the
runtime registry.
• Versioning and Lifecycle – If a service is used by
more than one business process then it lead to
enhance and extend services in a way that
manages the different requirements. Evolution of
services ultimately leads to multiple versions of
the same service. The ability to assign version
numbers to service interfaces and bind a client to
the appropriate service based on version
compatibility are mandatory for SOA to provide
BPI platform.
• Management – The SOA must define and measure
the performance of services and manage services
according to their agreements. SOA should offer
the ability to notify service providers and define
corrective action when performance is not being
met or certain thresholds are reached.
SOA platform enables a new level of flexibility
and agility to BPI (Baresi and Guinea, 2005). The
services layer provides the ideal platform for the
business process due to the business functionality
that map to the services in a business process. The
admission of implementing an SOA is to provide a
loosely coupled integration platform that allows
application instance to change and evolve without
affecting the core integration technology. The
process modifications that require different
applications to communicate with each other should
not alter the core integration technology as well as
application instance. The process and service
independence establishes the relationship between
business process modelling and application
implementation.
Figure 2: BPI in conjunction with SOA.
Figure 2 depicts the relationship between BPI
and SOA. BPI accomplishes the modelling,
simulation, and re-engineering of processes. SOA
infrastructure orchestrates business processes and
mediates service providers. SOA is tied to process
services resulting composite business flows. A
service-level content model is defined based on the
business domain and it is independent of the ECM
model. BPI includes additional run-time power for
SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT - In Association with Business Process
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service composition. It has ability to modify a flow
in exchange for more run-time complexity necessary
for compensating transactions in the case of failure.
3 CHARACTERISTICS OF REAL-
TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT
MANAGEMENT (RT-ECM)
A common infrastructure is essential to manage
unstructured information due to increasing number
of enterprise applications with collaborative
requirements. Most enterprises are not designed to
cohesively manage unstructured information.
Information is exchanged outside of a provided
enterprise application such as a sales record in a
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
prohibiting collaboration among multiple users
(Sreenan and Cranor et al., 2001).
One of the most critical phases of unified content
strategy is building an appropriate ECM platform
(Sheth A. et al., 2002). Determining the elements
required for each information type and methodology
to integrate with enterprise functionality for
optimum usability is at the highest consideration
when deciding upon the modelling technique. The
ECM model becomes the summit for an enterprise
architecture framework. Information is discerned at
element level in unified content strategy. Elements
are stored in a single source instead of distributed
across platform. Elements are then compiled into
content management and delivery artefacts. The
power of content reuse lies in effectively reusing
information elements. ECM platform must identify
all the required elements and illustrate how to
structure and reuse them.
The process of developing ECM platform
involves identifying information requirements for a
particular enterprise. The decisive factor is to
identifying the exact location of information
ownership. The subsequent phase is to build a model
illustrating the compilation of information elements.
ECM model ensures the consistency, scalability, and
reliability of information across organization.
Guaranteed content integrity property of ECM
enables point-in-time recovery for all metadata
stored to the information resources and for all
element structures residing in external storage.
Point-in-time recovery of the metadata is
accomplished through standard content management
utilities (Uniform Server, 2006) including regular
backup schedule of the available as well as valid
content. The three core business issues that ECM
addresses are content development, application
content management, and content delivery or
acceleration. Content development is the process of
obtaining content from a concept to an organized
and enterprise-wide accepted state.
Figure 3: Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Platform Overview.
Application content management is viewed as
process of carrying artefacts characterizing
particular delivery context. It is also responsible for
enhancing artefacts with value-added metadata and
eventually deploying them to the appropriate
delivery environments (or channels) in the
predefined combination as well as format. Content
delivery management is process of managing the
controlled and optimized delivery of artefacts to the
intended enterprise users. Figure 3 depicts the core
functional blocks of a successful ECM.
Identifying behaviour of ECM platform in real-
time is recent industry trend due to the unpredictable
alteration of enterprise information during critical
business decisions. The present offering of
enterprise architecture is to organize and present
right information at the right time throughout the
product development (or service) life cycle. RT-
ECM platform begins in response to a specific
organizational objective and often with the goal of
managing content to the intranet or portal to satisfy
the requirements of real-time transactions
considering temporal properties of enterprise
content.
Specific and well-bounded enterprise
architectures (Leune, 2004) lead organizations to
select a tightly bounded RT-ECM solution. RT-
ECM targeted at the identified pain point always
appears an attractive alternative to accomplish
current requirements. However, the solution
presenting immediate clarification persuades
additional and unforeseen challenges. It is utilized to
build great point-to-point solutions connecting one
group of content management platform to a
constituency of content consumers. Although
resolution frequently lacks to scale in broader
requirements as well as efficiently deliver multiple
instantiations of time sensitive content access (or
update). Instead, content is locked to other
information storage facility and can not seamlessly
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be presented to newly introduced enterprise
applications.
RT-ECM requires considering following
artefacts when architecting a solution that can be
highly integrated and scalable to BPI platform.
• Define and address short-term goals but also
consider the broad ways content management
could be applied within the organization.
• Assume successful initial ECM in concise form
may lead to additional implications across other
business units and constituencies.
• Ability to deliver multiple initiatives from the
single infrastructure such that the cost-of-
ownership (TCO) of additional integration units
can be lowered.
• Ability to dynamically delivery content and
reduced response time to the content change
requests or upgrades.
4 OUR APPROACH – BPI
ENABLED SOA BASED
RT-ECM
Section 3 indicates that RT-ECM platform must
have architecture compatible to the service contracts
pertaining to SOA governance providing a single
streamlined environment that can serve all enterprise
users (Turner M. et al., 2004). In this section, we are
presenting SOA based RT-ECM encouraging
disparate enterprise applications to communicate in
an environment that is scalable, process oriented,
and robust to achieve business demands. A RT-ECM
framework leverages all of the underlying
components to deliver distinct services to a wide
range of enterprise users in secure fashion. The
approach inclined to provide the architecture
framework ensuring each user’s experience is
personalized and that management of service
delivery is standardized.
Each layer in the architecture presented is
buffered from changes in the other layers (Leune,
2004). Moreover, the services are available for reuse
improving productivity and accelerating content
management ability responding to the specified
business objective. BPI feature requirements
available to the RT-ECM encapsulating business
processes as services. The service developer
publishes a description of services in a registry
encoded in an XML dialect. If RT-ECM developer
requires a service of specific type, it is searchable
from registry. Similarly, enterprise application
modules can browse the services interacting with
real-time content from registry. The services model
coordinates three roles and respective
responsibilities. Service providers publish wares
through brokers that maintain registries. Enterprise
users find services in registries. Enterprise
application binds specific real-time content with
service at runtime.
Figure 4: SOA based RT-ECM enabling BPI –
Architecture Framework.
To define a terminology and derive consistent
RT-ECM model, we adapted and integrated the
basic notions from available business process
(Schmelzer, 2004) and content management (Sheth
A. et al., 2002) platform. It leads to a conceptual
framework for integrated model-based approach
presented in Figure 4. The content management
engine is defined by information model. It defines
the structure and composition of information
elements with respective dependencies. The
properties of an element denoted as the content
element configuration attributes. The content
management engine coordinates with content
discovery as well as content delivery modules.
Content discovery component of RT-ECM
platform receives type of service, SLAs with content
provider’s detail, enterprise capacity, and load
caused by user access. Elements are tagged or
untagged to map with the service defining how
elements are discovered and managed for the service
provisioning. Eventually content discovery is
triggered by either user request to service or as a
result of the actual discovery process occurs between
RT-ECM entities. Content-aware redirection
mechanisms embedded to content delivery
SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT - In Association with Business Process
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545

component forwards user requests to the service
provisioning that may best satisfy them. The
location of the requested content along with other
relevant information is utilized to determine
appropriate service from which content should be
served to the enterprise user. The service oriented
content management presented in Figure 4 consists
of a core set of building-block services including the
library service, workflow service, transformation
service, import and export services, publishing
service, and financial transaction service.
Figure 5: RT-ECM – Fundamental Integration Aspects.
Business process engine is to denote the active
substances of a business process in consideration.
Furthermore, the business process engine evaluates
task, resources, and enterprise content for the
process that requires to be served. The business rules
are specified to the BPI enabled platform. The
additional rules can be implied and supplemented to
the BPI platform. The business rules are directly
associated with the actors pertaining to service
provisioning component. The service provisioning
consists of set of services that the actor requests to
accomplish business process including temporary
results. The invocation of particular rule from BPI
platform triggers specific actor of service
provisioning.
Integration aspects within the business process
engine support processes at a low level of
abstraction for the technical lateral such as building
of derived software objects whereas on a high level
of abstraction for the management lateral such as
planning and monitoring of tasks. Concurrent and
correlated process instances have been
independently initiated, combined, and synchronized
during execution. A business process usually
consists of activities with different execution
behavior. The integration of ad-hoc workflow agents
into prior defined process is of particular interest for
business process engine. Processes are integrated
into an overall process model that satisfies global
constraints involving process chain. The integration
aspects between the business process engine, content
management engine, and service provisioning are
denoted in Figure 5.
Integration aspects within the content
management engine are of structural duality of
processes and products. Most of the business
processes are adapted to the product dimension.
Distinguish between physical and logical data
integration is a key challenge to the approach
presented in Figure 5. The content discovery covers
the aspect of integrating physically distributed
information into a logically centralized content
during the content development. The latter concerns
the integration of heterogeneous information
schemes and the transformation between different
content types are being considered at lexical,
syntactical, and semantic level. Integration aspects
of business process and content management engine
are controlled through service provisioning. The
service provisioning modules are developed based
on the following principles.
• The process and product (or service) structure
indicating the decomposition of processes in
terms of products (or services) and the
corresponding dependencies.
• Reflexivity: The representation technique and
formalism to provide reflective features from
process specification.
• The formal relationship derived between abstract
level of processes and product (or service)
specifications to determine the types of input and
output that a process may consume or produce.
The static relationship evaluates properties of the
actual content-flow.
• Content flow and information access: Different
types of content transition and information access
have been considered. In particular, the implicit
coordination by access control mechanisms may
affect the scheduling of activities under the
control of a business process and content
management engine.
• Behavioural interrelationships: The state of
objects affects the operational behaviour of a
process. A business process must not be started if
content is not valid for the provided timeframe.
Object’s state transitions are associated with
specific activities describing an object life-cycle
within business process.
5 EVALUATION AND
BENCHMARK CRITERIA
We have a three phase selection process to identify
and evaluate optimal service set between the
business processes and real-time content
management. The first phase is service discovery
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based on the criteria identified between content
management and service provisioning. It is followed
by constraint analysis and then optimization based
on enterprise user specific constraints. The
constraint analyzer module dynamically selects
services from subset of services that are identified
by the service discovery engine. Any set of services
for the precise business process satisfying the
constraints is a feasible set. The constraints analyzer
has two sub-modules, the constraint representation
module and the cost estimation module.
The constraint representation module allows
representing the business constraints in ontology
(Horrocks et al., 2004). A business constraint is
defined as any constraint that affects the selection of
a service for a process. The number of such business
constraints is specified to business process in terms
of business rules. Certain constraints may be more
important than others depending on the particular
instance of the process. A legitimate example of
representing business constraints is networking
product equipment ontology presenting relationships
between items such as adapters, circuit boards,
cables, power cords and batteries. The ontology is
utilized to capture the suppliers for each part, the
relationships with the manufacturer, and the
technology constraints pertaining to equipments.
Table 1 presents a working example of an
ontology that enables to identify required business
and technological constraints that are critical in
deciding the suppliers (or vendors).
Table 1: Rule specification in context of Business
Processes.
Process Parameters and
Context
Rule Specification
->Vendor-A is an
instance of network cable
supplier
->Vendor-A supplies
#Type-COAXIAL
->Vendor-A is a
preferred supplier.
<NetworkCableSupplier
rdf:ID=" Vendor-A">
<supplies
rdf:resource="#Type-
COAXIAL"/>
<supplierStatus>preferred
</supplierStatus>
</
NetworkCableSupplier>
->Type-COAXIAL is an
instance of Network
Cable
->Type-COAXIAL
works with
->Type-DS3-Circuit-
Board
< Network Cable
rdf:ID="Type-
COAXIAL">
<worksWith>
< Circuit-Board
rdf:ID="Type-DS3-
Circuit-Board">
</worksWith> </
Network Cable>
The cost estimation module queries the content
accumulated dedicated to estimating various factors
that directly impact the selection of services for the
process. The factors that we have considered when
selecting service for example represented in Table 1
are the depth of service dependencies, service’s
capabilities, and intensity of service (Aggarwal at
el., 2004). The depth of service dependencies are
based on business and technological constraints of
the items. One type of service captures the notion
that the selection of one service affecting choices of
other services. Cost for procurement, delivery time,
compatibility with other suppliers, relationship with
the supplier, reliability of the supplier’s service, and
response time of the supplier’s service are the
prominent examples of service’s capabilities. In
order to be able to set priorities between the factors,
the cost estimation module provides a way to specify
weights on each factor. Intensity of service is either
actual or estimated values of service in units
identified during the initial measurement criteria set
for the deployment cost.
The process integration level complexity is
calculated considering participant services in the
specified business process (n).
S
n
PI
Complexity (n)
= α ∑ [T
(i)
× C
(i)
× R
(i)
× A
(i)
× ECa
(i)
]
i=1
(1)
• T
(i)
represents the execution time of present
service.
• C
(i)
is cost (or time) of invoking service
considering identification of dependencies and
search effort involved within the business process
context.
• R
(i)
is reliability of service with respective to
validation of temporal content in utilization.
• A
(i)
is the factor deciding availability of service
from service registry.
• ECa
(i)
cumulative scores for enterprise content
access specific to business process parameters
associated with the service.
• α is the impartial factor identified during the
initial definition of business process (n) from
constraint representation module depending on the
type of request as well as technology involved.
• S
n
is the number (or set) of services participated in
business process (n).
• × represents predefined or custom defined
aggregation operator.
For most metrics, the PI
Complexity
is calculated
using the aggregation operators such as summation,
multiplication, and maximum or minimum of
services presented in the business process. However,
in certain cases, the user defines a custom function
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Integration
547

for aggregation. The enterprises also generates
performance metrics utilizing pilot project through
the SOA based models and create set of
experiments. The experimental evaluation is
typically conducted to identify the performance
measures with explicit timing variations according
to the types of target market as well as technology
involved in the businesses. Several benchmarks are
also generated by initiating the enterprise-wide
questionnaires represented below as an example.
The reliable and accurate method to measure the
success of BPI during RT-ECM is to communicate
and conduct the organizational survey identifying
the benefits related to primary drivers behind the
adapted service model.
• How much faster delivery of information and
services at reduced operating cost?
• What leverage value of and investment made in
existing enterprise?
• Whether it provides seamless integration of core
services among internal and external partners,
customers, and suppliers?
• What types of value-added decision making have
been supported?
• How much reduction in manual content access,
lookup, and upgrade resulting in higher quality
and performance?
• What are the system integration cost and
improvements in traditional delivery times?
• Whether it brings enhanced product (or service)
offerings to market faster than before?
• What advantage it offers to resolve business
problems that are considered costly, time
prohibitive, unrealistic, or impossible to achieve?
6 CASE STUDY - OBSERVATIONS
During our evaluation of various available
methodologies, we found different solutions to
incorporate BPI platform. We have categorized
available solutions and suite vendors in three
different classifications depending on the
architecture characteristics, industry utilization, and
implications of business processes. Model, execute,
and monitor developed business processes. The right
approaches to model SOA yields to many practical
applications for each category identified. Table 2
represents our evaluation of business processes in
simulated environment (E107, 2006). It illustrates
the measurement of PI
Complexity
attribute depicted in
Equation 1.
Table 2: Industry Based Evaluation – Process Integration
Complexity (PI
Complexity
).
Advantages are identified through implying the
concept to the reality in various industry segments as
indicated in Table 2. The observations designates
following features and characteristics of ensuing BPI
platform.
• Secure IT investment: Customers do not have to
switch platforms, re-implement software, and/or
incur additional hardware for expanded
capabilities. For example, abstraction in terms of
services to manufacturing assembly-line
instructions process remains unmodified upon
technology change.
• Connectivity: It provides the flexibility to
collaborate through sharing of content across
supply-chain and enables ability to view
enterprise application interfaces augmenting
existing business processes. The most prominent
scenario is the ecommerce activity in a secure
environment.
• Enhanced product quality: It reduces the risk
within the product development life cycle where
code must be manipulated in order to deliver new
functionalities. It offers reduction in maintenance
cost as a result of reuse. The transaction approval
process as set of services in financial industry
remains unmodified even if the type of business
alters.
• Accelerated development: It greatly reduces the
time required to perform quality assurance (QA)
due to automation made uncomplicated. With less
time needed for QA, it is possible to accelerate
development cycles expanding the functional
depth and breadth of the product. The wide spread
utilization of Tivoli and IBM WebSphere (Baresi
and Guinea, 2005) in product development is an
undoubting proof.
• Simplified upgrades: As recent versions of the
enterprise software are released, customers do not
have to deploy an entire executable. Instead, the
ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
548

only receivable modules that have an impact
should be available in latest release. The
automated documentation revision process is an
excellent pattern to represent in standardization
industry.
• Remote access: Remote employees are able to
easily access content without having to connect
through VPN or use terminal server. The current
advances in SOA based XML VPN controller
indicates the seamless advantage of combining
technology and business (Radding, 2006)
• Scalability: It provides the foundation for new
business processes on the horizon. As customer
relationship management (CRM) and supply-
chain management processes evolve, SOA
enabled business processes are equipped to
integrate new practices.
• Flexibility: The framework facilitates grouping of
information and display supporting unique
business process. Advanced content management
platform (E107, 2006) in combination with
enterprise server (Uniform Server, 2006) is an
excellent example of user configured real-time
content presentation.
7 CONCLUSION
The automation, integration, and optimization of
business processes across the enterprise have
become essential to leverage competitive advantage
for organizations today. BPI and SOA provides a
perfect combination for real-time enterprises. BPI
platform presents higher level abstraction for
defining businesses processes as well as other
important capabilities of monitoring and managing
processes. Derived services present the functions
that support business processes. SOA offers the
capabilities to combine and construct an agile
enterprise model. SOA based RT-ECM offers
integrity that enterprises are require solving business
process problems and improving operational
efficiencies. RT-ECM enables enterprises to produce
rationalized system infrastructure based on implied
SOA models. It supports rapid assembly and
orchestration of process services into larger end-to-
end business processes.
In this paper, we discussed business process
engine, real-time content management engine, and
service provisioning aspects of SOA in detail. We
have experience enhanced productivity as well as
accuracy due to flawless access of most relevant and
appropriate information in real-time. Since the
developed version of architecture is generalized to
certain extend, subsequent stage is to contrast and
compare various industry specific business processes
and associated services according to the identified
decisive evaluation factors. Impact of developed
SOA based RT-ECM in association with BPI
architecture framework on various types of business
models may prove challenging goal to achieve as the
consequent research effort.
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