Published on 10-Feb-2011
Validated on 07 Dec 2012
"As a complete package the IBM SOA BPM suite is very powerful " - John Gallagher, Applications Architect at City University London
Customer:
City University London
Industry:
Education
Deployment country:
United Kingdom
Solution:
Enabling Business Flexibility, Information Integration, Optimizing IT, Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services
IBM Business Partner:
Maven Associates
Overview
This video features John Gallagher, Applications Architect at City University London discussing the benefits of WebSphere BPM solutions.
Business need:
One of the challenges we as an IS Department in the university find is that our students are becoming more demanding as they are becoming more aware of technology. We need to give students access to a number of called back-end systems including the virtual learning environment.
Solution:
City University has bought in completely to IBM’s vision of business process management so we have invested both in the tools and our business analysis on the modeling aspects of the technology.
Benefits:
We have already seen some return to date. This year, with the launch of our online element of our registration project, we are eliminating the need for paper forms. This is essentially going to save us the order of 5000 or 6000 pounds in postage.
Video
Maven Associates, an IBM Business Partner, helped City University London create a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that uses IBM WebSphere Process Server to automate the entire process – enabling students to register online before they arrive. The new architecture also provides a highly flexible foundation for future business process re-engineering projects.
Video Transcript
Our focus is on providing education for the professions and business focusing heavily on the City of London so business studies, law and health care. We have approximately 24,000 students
One of the challenges we as an IS Department in the university find is that our students are becoming more demanding as they are becoming more aware of technology.
They have become more demanding about the level of functionality and support that we need to provide
We need to give students access to a number of called back-end systems including the virtual learning environment ... This has posed us historically a number of challenges because we have had to rely on batch feeds from our student record system that were clunky and often went wrong. … It was only when a student complained they did not have access to the right material that we would retrospectively correct the data.
We were essentially solving an integration problem but we looked at it in terms of a business process…
Rather than just putting in an Enterprise Service Bus that would provide an integration capability, we added on top of it the WebSphere Process Server to provide that choreography that would give us visibility of business processes.
As a complete package the IBM SOA BPM suite is very powerful … City University has bought in completely to IBM’s vision of business process management so we have invested both in the tools and our business analysis on the modeling aspects of the technology. So we model our processes in WebSphere Business Modeler, we then take them and build them in Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer and we deploy them to WebSphere Process Server.
One of the benefits we have had is better quality information both in our student record system and therefore in our other systems as a result of this.
We have other social media tools like Connections from IBM and to embed that in a portal experience so that students have a one-stop shop in order to access any service in our organization…
What our SOA environment and the services that we have built provide us is the capability to pull together live data from a number of different systems … to provide information to our key business stakeholders about how we are filling our courses, the policy of the students, the balance of students against home against overseas.
We are able to look at the balance of students coming into a particular course and to judge whether that’s actually correct or as desired or we are able to fine tune the entrance requirements to actually improve the level of students coming in.
We have already seen some return to date. This year, with the launch of our online element of our registration project, we are eliminating the need for paper forms. This is essentially going to save us the order of 5000 or 6000 pounds in postage.
By adopting SOA and the reuse capability potentially this will allow us to react better, to work smarter and to make use of the finite resources that we have got in order to deliver a solution that our business needs.
Please see the related case study here.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Business Modeler, Rational Application Developer