Event-Driven Productivity Infrastructure

Taylor, Hugh

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/15121 Copy

Description

Title

Event-Driven Productivity Infrastructure

Author(s)

Taylor, Hugh

Issue Date

2008-02-28

Keyword(s)

• EDA
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Productivity Infrastructure

Abstract

The world of information technology is currently experiencing the parallel emergence of two separate paradigms, Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and Productivity Infrastructure (PI). Each of these constructs has unique portent for the ways in which people interact with data and applications. However, there is also an exciting potential for the two constructs to work together in an integrated, synergistic fashion. EDA is an approach to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that creates an “enterprise nervous system,” aware of changes in state that occur within applications, databases, as well as the outside world by publishing state information through XML to a message backbone, such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Event listeners, also connected to the ESB, distribute state change data to Service-oriented applications for processing and reaction, including human interactions. The EDA approach to enterprise architecture offers advantages in agility and segregation of concerns that benefit the utility of information systems. Productivity infrastructure (PI) is an umbrella term to describe people’s and organization’s increasingly connected and synergistic use of phone, email, Internet, PDA, PDA, intranet, extranet, and desktop productivity applications. What was once a collection of essentially siloed productivity technologies and work flows – phone calls, emails, searching the Web, creating documents, using a PDA, and so on – are now merging into a combined infrastructure that drives personal and organization productivity. In brand name terms, productivity infrastructure is integrating the functionality of product sets such as Microsoft’s Office System, Cisco’s VOIP solutions, IBM’s Lotus suite, and Google’s Docs and gMail services, just to name a few. This paper explores the potential integration of EDA with productivity infrastructure. Events that originate from applications in the EDA can be published to individual human users, or collaborative groups operating in the productivity infrastructure. The integration has the potential to connect real time operations of an enterprise with Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis, as well as a range of mobile computing technologies, in addition to standard portal interfaces. The paper focuses on the ways that productivity infrastructure empowers the human thinking and decision making that is often implicit in the process flow of an EDA. It looks at scenarios where EDA-PI integration can improve the speed, quality, and cost effectiveness of end users in a large enterprise environment. Further, the paper will examine the potential for real time human activities to become events themselves, which can flow in the other direction and drive application functioning in the EDA.

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/15121

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