E-Business Solutions with eProgression
eProgression based architectures are the most advanced in the world, strategically enabling e-business while rapidly delivering application solutions.
eProgression is fast becoming the "professionals choice" as a powerful method with broad appeal to those within the industry. Solution architecture is viewed holistically, including existing legacy assets and packaged software allowing for faster application delivery and a lower cost of ownership. Additionally, eProgression's unique application architecture promotes distributed computing environments that are rapidly being sought in e-business initiatives.
eProgression literally forces "an Understanding of the Business." Designed for component-based development and usage, eProgression delivers a manageable enterprise architecture that provides support for multiple platforms, e-business, and application integration.
Why? The eProgression technique departs from conceptual IE activity hierarchies. eProgression users must have a clear view at a "hands on" level as they identify services and search for legacy data. Events and Responses remain clear and are more easily understood by developers as they use them to guide design and construction.
eProgression provides practical, effective, and field-tested business solutions. One important consideration is the degree to which components will be generic, or reusable. Experience shows that, in the rush to implement component-based systems, service providers often fail to gain a full understanding of the business applications at hand. By trying to create fully generic components, providers can overburden a system with overlapping services that never quite meet the client's needs.
Experience guides N/A away from such pitfalls. By first focusing on providing specific business solutions that can be generalized gradually, MTW provides a balanced, incremental approach that never loses sight of the "big picture." With the eProgression Method, an entire framework of components is developed in support of a business process. The establishment of a component framework helps maintain a balance between the pieces and the whole, ensuring that each component actually contributes to the overall business functionality.
As components are carved out of existing resources and modified to enhance functionality, they are fed directly back into the business.
This incremental approach increases shared software modules while cutting down on solution-delivery time. MTW's time-proven technique provides solutions that are immediately applicable while still being open to future development. Thus, both greater flexibility and greater potential for reuse are realized in a functional, component-oriented application designed to meet the overall business needs. Also, this allows the user a great deal of input in the analysis and design of systems, which results in a stronger, better, and more comprehensive match with clients' needs.
With flexibility built-in at a fundamental level, eProgression-generated applications are consistently easier to maintain and significantly easier to change at a later date.
Technology Independence Designed to be completely technology-independent, eProgression allows the flexibility for system architectures to cross platform and operating system boundaries. Equally important in providing this flexibility is the fact that eProgression efforts are completely supported by CBD '96 Standards, and are 100% complementary, though not limited to, the enterprise level tools developed by Sterling Software.
The eProgression Method allows developers the freedom to choose the correct set of tools to deliver solutions. In most cases, these tools are already in-house, helping IT organizations to avoid the costly mistakes and wasted time associated with large technology learning curves and new development tools. eProgression also allows companies to rise above the technology wars waged weekly in the press and remain focused on providing timely business solutions to pressing business needs.
Three Basic Elements At the heart of eProgression are:
1. Facet,
2. Hub,
3. Business Components
Provides clear separation of what is private to one application and what is intended for sharing among multiple applications.
• The Facet and the Hub are private to an application. The user interacts with the application through the Facet, which often consists of screens, windows, and reports.
• The Hub provides services to the Facet by requesting and packaging services from Business Components. The Hub also controls transaction integrity.
• The Business Components can be shared among multiple applications. They provide services that apply business rules and also access and change data.
Leveraging Existing Systems
Another key feature of eProgression is its use of complementary technologies that harvest legacy systems' assets. Through its comprehensive approach to managing the increasingly complex application execution environment, eProgression provides a roadmap showing how to easily and seamlessly access services from throughout an enterprise to address changing business needs. By using eProgression, MTW has developed a straightforward process to revitalize legacy system functionality. When a given component requires execution of services that are already contained within a legacy system, eProgression recommends leveraging the existing resource.
This approach is an important aspect of the eProgression Method. Instead of rewriting and replacing code for still-viable systems that may simply need a new user interface or enhancement of functionality, eProgression provides an incremental and immediate solution using existing IT assets. Over time, pieces of the legacy system's functionality can be replaced with newer business components. And with the eProgression framework in place, it is easy to reroute old functionality to new components. The most important advantage of this approach is the flexibility it provides in delivering timely solutions to immediate business needs.
The eProgression approach does not intend to replace an entire application in one magical manifestation.
Rather, it is a balanced approach to develop needed business functionality through the reuse of existing components, the creation of new components, and the tapping of legacy systems for any functionality still applicable to the business. By using a very focused process of "carving out" pieces of a legacy system, users can quickly take advantage of new technology (such as the Internet) by wrapping old technology. This method of leveraging legacy systems has proven to be very successful and beneficial for delivering effective business solutions within reduced timeframes.