A SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH

TO EFFICIENT DECISION SUPPORT

Goran Mihelcic

, Bo Hu

and Stefan Pickl

Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, Mathematics, and Operations Research,

University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39, Neubiberg, Germany

Faculty of Business Administration, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany

Keywords: SOA, Decision support, Participatory modeling, Content & collaboration systems.

Abstract: Historically grown IT-landscapes in modern business, often referred to as ‘legacy’ systems or ‘accidental

architectures’, can have a strong impact on the efficiency of decision support processes. Caused by a high

level of separation of essential software applications, crucial information needed may often be difficult and

time consuming to retrieve. The authors show one approach of how distributed business-critical software

applications can be integrated using the service oriented architecture paradigm. The implementation of

webservices can increase the flexibility and integrity of decision support processes. The authors demonstrate

their approach in the context of a participatory system dynamics modelling application.

1 INTRODUCTION

Modern businesses and organizations are

dependent and relying on effective and efficient

decision making of their employees on all

strategic levels. In modern economies, about 40%

of the employed staff is predominantly engaged to

decision making (Johnson, 2005).

An important role within this context is taken by

modern IT-systems that support, control, and

streamline often business-critical processes. Based

on data and information drawn from these systems

(also referred to Business Transaction Systems) and

supported by his human-judgement and experience,

the decision maker aspires to find the best possible

solution to a given problem. Quite often, with the

partly rapid growing of companies, the rising

demands for further IT-support in newly emerging

(process) business areas is met by just adding new

applications to the existing IT-landscape. Along with

this 'strategy' comes the shortcoming of taking the

mutual ability of integration among these software

components into account.

The arising problems of e.g. redundant data

management and inconsistent information in such

"ad hoc-ritectures" or "accidental architectures"

(see, e.g., Roth, 1999; Booch, 2006) negatively

influence the quality of decision making and

therefore the performance of the company.

Ultimately, this may result in loosing competitive

advantages "even though" significant investments

into the IT-infrastructure have been made. As in

these cases the reorganization respectively

replacement of (parts of) the operating IT-systems

often result in direct loss of productiveness, a

‘smoother’ approach aiming at an increase of the

level of integration has to be determined.

Service oriented architectures (SOA) and the

introduction of webservices (WS) have proven to

be useful in such environments and may lead to a

streamlining of the given IT-landscape. In the

following, a short review of related works is given

and based on a prototype (Hu, 2011) we

demonstrate in this paper that SOA, in particularly

based on WS, can be used to integrate decision-

support functions broadly into enterprise business

transaction systems.

2 EXTENDING DECISION

SUPPORT TO BUSINESS

TRANSACTION SYSTEMS

When it comes to the management of large

215

Mihelcic G., Hu B. and Pickl S..

A SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO EFFICIENT DECISION SUPPORT.

DOI: 10.5220/0003759802150218

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems (ICORES-2012), pages 215-218

ISBN: 978-989-8425-97-3

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

amounts of data, data warehouses are one

approach to deal with mass data. In order to

transform the given data into valuable business

information, a class of information systems called

"Business Intelligence Systems" is often applied.

Business Intelligence (BI) systems (in a wider

sense) comprise all applications that directly or

indirectly provide decision support. These

systems include analysis and presentation, as well

as, data preparation and storage functionality

(Kemper, 2006).

Management Support Systems (MSS) can be

described as the early predecessors to BI systems.

They focused – similarly to BI systems – on

"the

use of computers and related information

technologies to support managers

" (Scott, 1983).

Nowadays, competitive businesses have to

support decision making not exclusively on higher

strategic management levels but furthermore have

to support important decision making processes at

all strategic levels, and therefore consistently

down to the operational levels. Accordingly, an

appropriate IT support has to be provided that

may e.g. be implemented by a business

transaction system.

BI systems build the core for business

transaction systems (see e.g. June et al., 2008) that

constitute the base application for effective

decision making of business personnel. As a front

end layer, business transaction systems provide

the decision maker with important data and

information about the company. In order to

establish a web based interface to the user, these

front end layers are often implemented as or

integrated into content management and

collaboration systems that may be accessed using

a web browser.

When it comes to the question of closing the

gap between the core BI system (or integrating

any kind of application from the back end) and the

business transaction front end, one approach that

can be applied is the service oriented one.

A service oriented (software/system) architecture

is an abstract description of how services can be

provided, searched for, and applied within a network

infrastructure. One of its central features is its

platform independency which enables a (business)

process oriented view on central (service oriented)

software components (Melzer, 2010).

Services can be described as (small)

applications or software components that fulfill a

certain (sub-)task and that may be accessed via a

network. In order to be locatable, services have to

provide a public description of their interfaces.

Following the design aspect of "information

hiding" the implementation, respectively the code

of the service, is invisible to the user (ibid.).

One way of implementing and technologically

representing the concept of a service is the

development of a respective webservice. A common

definition of webservices is provided by the W3C

(World Wide Web Consortium) (W3C, 2004):

"A Web service is a software system identified

by a URI [...], whose public interfaces and

bindings are defined and described using XML.

Its definition can be discovered by other software

systems. These systems may then interact with the

Web service in a manner prescribed by its

definition, using XML based messages conveyed

by Internet protocols."

An important precondition to the introduction

of webservices is the necessity of having thorough

knowledge of the underlying business processes.

They represent the basic layer for the

development of a webservice structure. A

business process can use a variety of different

webservices from its starting to its end point. A

stringent business process management approach

will support the understanding of the vital

corporate procedures and will furthermore enable

a consistent implementation of business processes

into corporate IT systems.

The ability of connecting different software

systems combined with its platform independency

makes (web-)services a crucial factor when a (re-)

integration of historically grown "accidental

architectures" is intended.

The following case study shows a simple

example of how webservices can be used in the

context of a heterogeneous software landscape

and how it provides flexible support to a decision

support system.

3 CASE STUDY: INTEGRATION

OF SYSTEM DYNAMICS

MODELING INTO A CONTENT

AND COLLABORATION

SYSTEM

Participatory System Dynamics (SD) modeling

can be seen as an important option to support

decision-making processes (Andersen, 1997).

ICORES 2012 - 1st International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems

216

Figure 1 shows a use case diagram of a web-based

participatory modeling platform which aims to

support intensive collaboration between the

modelers and the decision-makers. When a

decision-maker views the model, comprehensive

explanations about the model structure are

displayed step-by-step in synchronization with the

model which is displayed graphically using any

recent web browser (Hu, 2011).

Figure 1: Use cases diagram for a web-based participatory

modeling platform.

Compared to a standard content and

collaboration system the only key function to be

implemented was a server-side viewer for System

Dynamics models. As shown in Figure 3 the

modules for the viewer "Mdl2Xml" and

"Xml2Img" are implemented using Microsoft's

.NET technology and connected natively to an

Xml-centric content and collaboration system

which is also based on .NET technology and

provides basis functions like file repository and

role based access control as well as tools

supporting collaboration. If another content and

collaboration system or another server is preferred

SOA, especially WS is the right choice of

architecture pattern.

Figure 2: Native connection of modules supporting

participatory modeling to a content and collaboration

system natively.

The server-side viewer for System Dynamics

models is implemented as a webservice and can

be integrated into any content and collaboration

system which is capable to provide an interface

calling webservices, as depicted in Figure 3. Also

in the given case the basic functions and

collaboration tools are provided by the content

and collaboration system into which the server-

side model viewer is integrated. The webservice

itself has not to manage the persistent data

directly.

Figure 3: Integrating modules supporting participatory

modeling into a content and collaboration system using

webservices.

The webservice shown in the figure above is a

loosely coupled part of the integrated application

and can easily be transferred and integrated into

different application contexts. If furthermore,

during the productive use of the given application,

the need for a different type of visualization

occurs, the webservice can comfortably be

adapted to the changes needed. Furthermore,

different webservices from internal or external

providers can be flexibly interchanged.

4 SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK

In this paper the authors described one way of

dealing with grown IT-landscapes or so-called

"accidental architectures" by choosing the service

oriented architecture approach. In particular the

application of webservices has been explored and

implemented within a case study. This approach

has proven to be promising in the developed

model case.

Besides the major advantages of being

platform independent and enabling connectivity

A SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO EFFICIENT DECISION SUPPORT

217

between different software systems, the concept

of webservices also brings along a variety of

disadvantages. Besides security issues (e.g.

authentication) and performance problems caused

by the overhead of XML-message handling, the

high effort of integrating legacy systems

("accidental architectures") has to be carefully

examined in its relation to the achievable benefit.

Especially when the coding and providing of the

service is outsourced, further sensitive issues arise

as e.g. the dependency on the provider as well as

his failure rate and trust issues etc. (Finger, 2009)

Being aware that real-world IT-landscapes in

modern businesses are far more complex, the

authors still believe that the paradigm of SOA can

be one method to increase the level of integration

among historically grown and disconnected

software applications. Further research of the

authors aims at the verification of this hypothesis

in the context of larger IT-landscapes.

REFERENCES

Andersen, D. F., Richardson, G. P. and Vennix, J. A. M.,

1997. Group model building: adding more science to

the craft. System Dynamics Review, 13 (187–201)

Booch, G., 2006. The Accidental Architecture. IEEE

Software, Volume 23 Issue 3 (9 - 11), ISSN 0740-

7459, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos,

CA, USA, May 2006

Finger, P., Zeppenfeld, K., 2009. SOA und WebServices.

Informatik im Fokus, O. Günther, W. Karl, R.

Lienhart, K. Zeppenfeld (Hrsg.), 1. Auflage, Springer,

Dordrecht

Hu, B., Leopold, A., 2011. Web-based Participatory

System Dynamics Modelling – Concept and Prototype

Development. The 2011 International Conference of

the System Dynamics Society, Proceedings,

Washington DC, July 24 – 28

Johnson, B. C., Manyika, J. M., Yee, L. A., 2005. The

Next Revolution in Interactions. The McKinsey

Quarterly, Number 4 (20-33)

June, J. P., Dan, O., 2008. New Perspectives Computer

Concepts. USA: Thomson Course Technology, 10

Edition

Kemper, H.-G., Mehanna, W., Unger, C., 2006. Business

Intelligence – Grundlagen und praktische

Anwendungen. Eine Einführung in die IT-basierte

Managementunterstützung. 2. Auflage, Vieweg &

Sohn Verlag, Wiesbaden

Melzer, I., 2010. Service-orientierte Architekturen mit

Web Services. 4. Aufl., ISBN 978-3-8274-2549-2,

Spektrum Akademischer Verlag

Roth, C., 1999. Web "Ad Hoc-ritecture" Pain. Reining In

the Chaos - 3rd 1999 Trend Teleconference, MATA

Group

Scott, M. M., Rockart, M. J., 1983. Implications of

changes in information technology for corporate strategy,

in: Interfaces 14: Jan-Feb, 1984, MIT, (84-95)

World Wide Web Consortium, 2004. Web Service

Architecture Requirements, http://www.w3.org/

TR/wsa-reqs/ (28.08.2011)

ICORES 2012 - 1st International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems

218