Content-enabling Your Business Processes

SOA has fueled something of an integration renaissance. Historically, application integration developed a well-deserved reputation for being difficult and expensive. Over the past several years, the confluence of multi-tiered Internet computing, object-oriented programming and Web services has provided the basis for comprehensive, stable, secure, standards-based platforms such as Oracle Fusion Middleware, which provides tools such as BPEL, workflows and Web services to make application integration easier and faster than ever before.

An open-standards-based SOA offers a highly flexible approach to content-enabling and optimizing critical business processes, providing organizations with the foundation they need to be more productive and responsive in delivering quality products and services when and where they are needed, and with controls built in. For example, Oracle Fusion Middleware enables organizations to:

• Define and modify rules using self-service Web-based user interfaces;
• Automate the creation, attribution and storage of documents based on rules in a business process context;
• Integrate workflow capabilities and event notification for document routing to the right people for review and approval prior to "official" storage;
• Extend services to use with business applications including JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle and other third-party legacy systems to seamlessly automate workflows;
• Analyze with reporting capabilities and business activity monitoring (BAM) using real-time dashboards based on KPIs and business requirements; and
• Secure and control information access with consolidated storage and retrieval of all related content, easing ability to meet regulatory disclosure requirements.

As organizations are becoming aware of the advantages and potential benefits of this kind of middleware, we are starting to see more of them content-enabling business processes and applications in services-oriented environments. For example, a major insurance corporation has optimized business practices and dramatically reduced costs by content-enabling the policy issuance process. Central to this initiative was the need to consolidate content storage and management from multiple traditional ECM repositories; to integrate document and content management functionality seamlessly into existing applications; and to enable seamless storage, search and retrieval operations across the enterprise.

Using automated rules and workflows as appropriate from the moment a policy application is entered, the insurance company's policy issuance process was dramatically shortened, in some cases from two days to a few minutes. Administrative steps were drastically reduced, allowing staff to focus on value-added or exception-based tasks. The result is increased speed, accuracy and throughput for all policies, from simple to complex. Thousands of brokers and customers can track the progress of policies online in self-service mode, to further facilitate action and decision-making. With productivity and responsiveness on the rise, increases in customer satisfaction and competitive advantage soon follow.

Many other business processes and applications can benefit from content-enablement and hold great potential for optimizing operations and better controlling content. Providing appropriate access to electronic personnel folders in the context of HR applications is one example. Integrating documents such as contracts, specifications, and designs with corresponding project management applications in engineering or consulting environments is another.

Content-enabling critical business processes and applications in a services-oriented environment may be the quickest and most effective way to obtain real business benefits from content management technology. Integrating content services into processes and applications that knowledge workers use every day can rapidly improve productivity and responsiveness while reducing costs and business risk, and for many organizations this may be the most practical path to achieving true enterprisewide deployment of "content management for the rest of us."

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Oracle Fusion Middleware is a portfolio of leading, standards-based, and customer-proven software products that include J2EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, content and records management. For more information, please visit www.oracle.com/collaboration.