More than four years ago, the Office of the Chief IT Architect (OCITA) recognized the value of implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development environment for NIH. OCITA chartered a domain team which recommended that NIH evaluate enterprise service bus (ESB) technologies and, if they seemed worthwhile, select a product for use at NIH. That evaluation led to the selection of an ESB and to the formation of the Integration Service Center (ISC) whose charter was to establish and manage the supporting environment. As the services provided by the ISC continue to grow, NIH is benefiting from the establishment of a powerful, flexible and secure environment for the development of shareable services.
OCITA officially formed the ISC two years ago to provide a central focus for hardware, software and governance. These services are necessary to provide an infrastructure that would support enterprise application integration and perform as a foundation for implementing SOA at NIH.
The ISC also provides more than a dozen “infrastructure web services” that can be used by any NIH application to extract data from various enterprise systems. For details on these web services, visit the ISC Portal (requires NIH login). The next ISC component was to provide policy protection for the ESB based web services. Policy protection allows any of the web services managed by the ISC to be open or have access limited in a very granular fashion.
The ISC ESB infrastructure illustrated the value of using shared services at NIH by making time and resource management more efficient. Numerous applications throughout the various ICs are using the infrastructure services provided by the ISC. At the current time, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is working with NIH Business System (NBS) and ISC staff to implement a web service that submits requisitions directly into NBS. Once this web service is fully functional, it will be available to applications in other Institutes and Centers (ICs). The ISC is also working with NBS staff to develop web service interfaces between govTrip, the federally mandated travel system, and NBS. These web services will provide additional transactional interfaces to NBS that will be available to IC based applications.
The latest service with the ISC is the acquired business process management (BPM) suite, which provides the ability to model and implement workflows which access both NIH based and remote services. At the current time, it is being used to develop workflow and services that implement a new version of the NIH Enterprise Directory (NED) software that will support new federally mandated privacy and security requirements. This project is not complete, but our early experience with the BPM software has been highly encouraging. It appears to provide an easy to use and effective methodology for modeling business processes and implementing workflows and services to support them. Once the NED project is complete, the ISC will evaluate the usefulness of the acquired BPM software. If it proves to be as effective as its early indications, it will be made available to ICs based applications as ISC resources permit.
For more information contact us.
