What is a Process Service? What is an Activity Service?

1-16 Concepts and Technologies Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture Figure 1–11 Elements in the Shared Services Inventory 1.7.1 What is a Process Service? A Process Service is the implementation of major business events in an enterprise that have a significant impact on running the enterprise. It involves work being accomplished with the help of multiple resources. Process Services automate business processes, orchestrate a series of human and automated steps, and normally span multiple information systems. They are analogous to Business Processes in AIA Reference Process Models. The primary purpose of Process Services in AIA is to define and automate business processes that are external to and independent of the specific back-end systems used in the organization. This shields the business process from back-end system changes. Similarly, the applications are isolated from business process changes. Loose-coupling between the business processes and the applications simplifies changes and maintenance for business processes and applications. Figure 1–12 depicts some characteristics of Process Services. Figure 1–12 Process Services The structure of the information packets that are passed around should be rich enough to capture all of the significant event details. These can be custom-defined or accepted canonical messages, and be independent of the enterprise applications. Process Services leverage the Activity Services and Data Services and are triggered by Understanding the Oracle AIA Reference Architecture 1-17 significant business event initiators, such as CRM, UI applications, and business-to-business B2B, for example. 1.7.2 What is an Activity Service? An Activity Service represents an atomic business unit of work and has a set of steps involving system-to-system interactions. Activity Services may also warrant orchestration. In some cases, there may be matching application capabilities. These are exposed as mediator services on the service bus. Activity Services can act upon multiple canonical messages and be consumed by participating applications and process services. The structure of the message is either canonical or a user-defined format. Figure 1–13 depicts some characteristics of Activity Services. Figure 1–13 Activity Services Activity Services are analogous to the Business Activities and Business Tasks in the AIA Reference Process Models. In some cases, multiple lower-level operations are combined to form an Activity Service, thereby hiding the complexity of the lower-level operations. 1.7.3 What is a Data Service?