Cloud Pak for Business Automation

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Discover and leverage our Reference Architectures for Digital Business Automation!

By Jean Pommier posted Fri June 21, 2019 11:45 AM

  

Here you are, we finally published our Cloud Reference Architectures for Digital Business Automation (DBA) on our public Cloud Architecture Center! Our DBA tile joins 29 other domains, ranging from technical aspects such as micro services or multi cloud management to industry areas.

What is in for you?

If you are a client, you can browse through these architectures to better understand a particular domain, and uncover all the capabilities and facets involved, especially when selecting and combining technologies, products or solutions. While the keyword architecture will of course appeal especially to software and enterprise architects, the diagrams, flows and associated texts as well as pointers to additional learning resources are all very accessible to non developers who want to learn more about a particular domain. In other words, this isn’t just for architects!

If you are a solution implementer (architect, developer), either a direct client, a business partner, system integrator, value-added reseller, independent consultant, you can leverage these architectures to build your architecture blueprints for your solution. Most solutions nowadays, especially across cloud and on-prem platforms, will involve more than one domain (e.g. integration, application development, automation, AI). You can download our reference architectures

If you are a competitor (sic), you can also leverage these architectures as the capabilities we capture in the diagrams and flows are meant to represent the state of the art of our IT industry; let us know what you think, in particular if you feel we missed something important in the representation of one of these domains! (Only the mapping of the diagram components to our own products wouldn’t apply of course.)

DBA and sub-domains Reference Architectures



How to navigate our DBA Reference Architectures?

If you are new to our Reference Architectures, here is a quick walk-through or short user guide to help with your first experience. A bit of anatomy and terminology to streamline your exploration…

DBA Reference Architecture page navigation

  1. First, like any file browser, the left margin provides the overall tree structure. At the top level you will find:
    1. An entry point or landing page (DBA introduction and overview);
    2. A link to the overall and top level DBA Reference Architecture;
    3. Sub domains corresponding to the DBA capabilities and areas: workflow management, content management, task automation (robotic), decision management with business rules, document capture, complex event processing and, soon, operational intelligence, the convergence of business activity monitoring and AI-based insights.
    4. Sections providing additional resources, either available on line or downloadable (videos, demos, Github repositories, …). See:  Explore,  Related learning,  Code patterns,  Solutions,  Related practices;
  2. For each reference architecture the key element in the page is a diagram that you can consult online or download in different formats in order to leverage it in your own solution design work. The circles denote architectural components or functions involved in the corresponding domain;
  3. Below the architecture diagram is the explanation of the typical overall solution flow whose steps are denoted by the numbers in the diagram itself (you click on Previous or Next to move along that flow). While some diagrams may be overwhelming at first, the flow typically guides you by highlighting the key and essential components first; as a matter of fact you don’t have to consume all these capabilities at once, we certainly recommend an iterative approach with a diligent focus on delivering business value in your solution, incrementally;
  4. A click on a component (circle or bubble) in the diagram will pop up the suggested mapping to corresponding technologies, a text which may contain additional links.

Pretty straight forward navigation hopefully; after all, a few designers have been working on this platform!

Your own diagram, your own solution architecture

Again, beyond the educational purpose of presenting information about these domains in such an accessible way, the key goal of these diagrams is for you to build your own diagrams by downloading several domains and selecting the components and functions corresponding to the solution you have to build to address the business challenges of your organization. There is actually an entire page with guidance related to various tools you can use to author your own architecture, check it out!

 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to get help implementing such solutions, or to provide feedback on these architecture design resources by leaving a comment below.

 

What’s next?

The first architectures, DBA and Content were published in January, followed by multiple iterations and additions of more domains since then so we are way beyond the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) stage. Yet we will keep enriching the content:

  • As alluded above, we are close to publishing our Operational Intelligence domain;
  • All domains will continuously be augmented with more related and updated content in the left margin (demos, videos, tutorials, readings, code samples);
  • Speaking of code, we are actively looking at a standalone end to end illustration of all the DBA capabilities included in our IBM Cloud Pack for Automation (new name for our existing DBA for Multicloud, or DBAMC in short), the packaging of our containerized offerings running on IBM Cloud Private (ICP), RedHat OpenShift or other certified container platforms; this set of DBA code, models, artifacts and documentation will be made available to you on our public Github repository;
  • Incidentally, it will be an example of Reference Implementation as well industry solution by applying the DBA concepts to an auto insurance claim process. More will follow.

Stay tune then and make a note to visit these pages again occasionally!

 

Acknowledgements

Creating all this content involved team work of course and I want to acknowledge these following key contributors to such an endeavor:

  • DBA content: Pierre Berlandier, Jérôme Boyer, Jeff Goodhue, Jake Jepperson, Stéphane Mery, Bob Nonnenkamp, Brian Petrini, Andy Ritchie, Tom Talone;
  • Designers: Glenn Daly (diagrams), Catherine Rivi and David Steinmetz (web editing);
  • Architecture Center guidance: David Hodges, Gopal Indurkhya, Heather Kreger;
  • Program management: Bob Flaherty.

With that, explore these diagrams as well as other domains, let your solutioning imagination go to plug all these icons together to craft your own architectures and have a successful digital business automation of your organization, all!

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