Manufacturing Executive - March/April 2009 - (Page 47) ensure we have that layer in place. Otherwise, SOA moves from old-fashioned function calls to calling it Web services at a technical level, but not much has really changed.” The compliance institute Svendsen refers to is the Industrial Interoperability Compliance Institute (IICI), a newly formed standards test center that operates under the ISA’s umbrella. IICI is working on a manufacturing maturity model based on the ISA-95 standard. It will test and certify the various semantic standards, such as the XML B2MML schema, that are needed to get business and manufacturing systems communicating using SOA. Today, the problem is that there are too many standards emerging within what is supposed to be an intuitive SOA environment. So IICI, together with other standards bodies, is working to come up with a framework that not only creates libraries with objects that can be reused, but also defines a common language and outlines a framework of work processes that can be replicated. “At the end of the day, SOA works fine until you realize you have to build a semantic information model by which you are going to apply SOA, and that’s “ SOA provides a key piece of the puzzle, a methodology for making and organising the piece parts, but it’s not the complete story. Venture Executive, Chevron Technology Ventures WSTF Tests SOA in the Real World A where the governance comes in,” says Charlie Gifford, chief manufacturing consultant at 21st Century Manufacturing Solutions LLC, who is also leading the IICI effort. In this case, governance is not just managing XML messages, but rather outlining “who owns those definitions and what change management processes you must go through to add or change the definition, and how to propagate that through [the systems],” Gifford says. services-oriented architecture starts with the underlying structure of Web stanAll of this work contindards that is an alphabet soup of acronyms: XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, to ues several years after the name a few. introduction of Web stanFor years, groups such as the Web Services Interoperability Organisation dards because SOA is still an (WS-I) have been testing these standards, which dictate how Web services are emerging technology when it created, how they behave, and how they seamlessly work together. But WS-I comes to manufacturing. stops short of offering real-world business scenarios that prove SOA-enabled applications “Fundamentally, I think not only function, but also add value to the organisation. that SOA provides a key Recently, a group of about a dozen vendors and end users united under the banner of piece of the puzzle, a meththe Web Services Test Forum (WSTF) to establish interoperability scenario-based testing odology for making and that reflects business processes at the enterprise level. In this model, the standards and specifications are considered within an end-to-end context. organising the piece-parts, “This forum develops test cases that are scenario-based and reflect more closely how but it’s not the complete these specifications get used in a particular context,” says Shivajee Samdarshi, senior story,” says Mike Brooks, director of engineering at TIBCO, a vendor partner in the WSTF organisation. venture executive at Chevron For example, WSTF will set forth specific business scenarios, such as a purchase order Technology Ventures. “By that requires tracking. In this case, the WSTF will work backward, using the business itself, it’s not even a ‘bag o’ scenario as the standard for defining what Web specifications are needed to support the parts’ it’s a way to make process. If reliable messaging is an important aspect of that scenario, WSTF will define the the parts. That’s a long way Web service security standards that should be invoked. from any complete soluThe purpose of WSTF is not to standardise business processes. Rather it is to test tion, and it’s going to take a the underlying SOA technology using business scenarios as the baseline. The group is vision, backed by strategy, organised to be an open source test model in which any technology contributed to the programs, and projects, to group is made available to the public royalty-free. get there.” The group operates independently of WS-I, but a reciprocal relationship enables And along the way, busiWSTF to feed test results back to the organisations defining the standards. ness will have to change. “Because of the nature of how this group is supposed to function, we’ve taken “This is the toughest part, specifications that are not even standards yet and coupled them with things that will managing change with people happen based on our experience developing the scenarios,” Samdarshi says. “Then and their roles in the busiwe can identify areas that WS-I should look at. So we are doing the legwork to idenness,” Mazda’s Ballingall tify what might happen and then we ask WS-I to tackle it.” ME says. ME Manufacturing MAR/APR-09 Executive “ Mike Brooks 47
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