Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation

15.8. How can services be adapted to reflect changing customer needs?

Consider a bank that offers credit check services to small and large customers. The small customers, such as a travel agency, require only simple credit checks for their customers, similar to checking the credit limit on a credit card for a family wanting to book a vacation. Larger customers have more complex credit checking needs, for lending for construction projects, for example. For this purpose, the bank has a mainframe risk management system.

A simple web service using SAP NetWeaver AS can handle the smaller customer's needs. For the larger customers, a brokered web service run through SAP NetWeaver XI can map the capabilities of the mainframe-based system to a web service. Figure 15-20 shows this architecture.

As time goes on, the travel agency begins offering tours and as a result, it sometimes requires a more complex credit check. By routing the requests through SAP NetWeaver XI, the bank can offer this service to its customer with simple reconfiguration of SAP NetWeaver XI, as follows:

• The travel agency must be configured as a message sender or receiver in the SAP NetWeaver XI Integration Directory.

• Web services requests from the travel agency must be routed to the correct receiver system and interface based on the content of the message.

• The channel for exchanging the messages must be configuredin this case, SOAP-based messages.

• XML messages received from the travel agency must map the sender to the receiver interface.

The reconfigured system is shown in Figure 15-21.

For more details about this example, see "Flexible Adaptation of Business Processes" by Martin Huvar and Sven Leukert, SAP Insider, Oct-Nov-Dec 2004.