Book Image

IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

Book Image

IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

Overview of this book

IBM WebSphere® Portal is a cost- effective, scalable, and proven solution for the portal enterprise space. Given the depth and the breadth of WebSphere Portal and the challenges of developing a portal project, you need a book that covers all the nuances of the entire portal project lifecycle. This book accomplishes just that. In this book, we cover topics that range from portal assessment, governance, and architecture, to design and development. These topics are covered not only within these traditional areas, but also within the cloud environment context. Keeping both contexts in mind, several chapters are dedicated to portal and portlet testing, troubleshooting, performance monitoring, best practices, and tuning. The cloud option is also analyzed and discussed for hosting, developing, and publishing portal applications. We also cover Web Experience Factory (WEF) as the tool of choice for portlet development. We take you from the introduction to the development of advanced portlets in an intuitive and efficient manner. We cover not only common topics, such as builders, models, and user interface development, but also advanced topics, such as Dojo builders, Ajax techniques, and WEF performance. Within the WEF space, we cover other topics, which have never been covered before by any other competing book. You will learn how to develop multichannel applications, including web mobile applications and you will learn about the model types available for portlet development, including when and how to utilize them. We also present and discuss numerous aspects and facets of implementing a WEF project and what it takes to successfully deliver them. The richness and the profundity of the topics combined with an intuitive and well-structured presentation of the chapters will provide you with all the information you need to master your skills with the IBM WebSphere Portal project lifecycle and Web Experience Factory.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
IBM WebSphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Getting started—case study


In this book, we will base all of our case study examples on a fictitious bank client named A2Z Bullion Bank that has, as a business driver, the need for modernization of its call center operations. Another major driver is the need to revamp and rebrand some of the banking operations via the consolidation and integration of a lot of application functionality, previously available in Customer Information Control System (CICS). Even though this client belongs to the financial sector, all the examples in this book can be easily correlated and translated to several other industry domains.

At a high level, the A2Z Bullion Bank, which has been providing other commercial banks with Bullion Vault services, uses 3270 terminals for its offshore call center operations. It uses CICS and a relational backend for its many frontend applications, all of which need to be consolidated via Portal. So far, the bank had only interfaced with other bullion or central banks, but it is now opening its operations to other corporate broker consumers interested in Bullion Vault services. The Vault services allow users to store physical bullion metal bars (gold, platinum, palladium, and silver) in the Vaults. Transfers from fiat currencies and loans are also services aligned with Vault services. Furthermore, users can forecast and trend their future Vault performance based on future metal spot prices. The bank stakeholders have decided on the need to have a self-service consumer-oriented channel for this new activity.

The goal of the bank is to understand how portal and the cloud would be able to help in the modernization process to be able to gauge the value added and ROI.

Let's start with our case study and the Business Value Assessment (BVA). IBM BVA is an IBM-driven methodology and should be applied with the help of IBM consultants and business partners. The generic steps of a portal BVA are cited and illustrated as follows:

  1. 1. One of the main goals of the assessment is to capture the business drivers for choosing this technology and evaluate the business value to be added with portal. The outcome of the business assessment is a current and future state gap analysis and subsequently a mapping of the business drivers and requirements to portal capabilities. The assessment covers business and technological aspects, and helps drive the next discussion of the need for portal governance, process, and organizational changes that a portal project can bring as a requirement to an organization new to portal. First, we cover in a workshop-like format with active interviewing of stakeholders per module target background, objectives, and defined approach. The output of these first items serves as an input to feed the next exercise. The business need and portal solution align together via the particular business and technical drivers and the current state of the business assessed. This initial portal assessment needs to be done for every portal engagement at a project and ideally at the program level. Next, we will cover the main steps in the BVA cycle — background, objective, and approach.

  2. 2. Business need and portal alignment.

  3. 3. A "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration.

  4. 4. Financial case.

  5. 5. Recommendations and next steps — POV.

Step 1 — background, objective, and approach

IBM consultants and partners have many ways to explore a BVA methodology. This direction was chosen because the BVA methodology can help to do the following:

  • It aligns Line of Business (LOB) and IT management with a common and prioritized set of capabilities for your portal.

  • It provides you with a vision of the portal when it's complete.

  • It gives you a high-level cost and benefit analysis to define the value of a portal solution in financial terms. The corporate positioning helps to set the stage for defining the vision, the strategy, and the execution.

Step 2 — business need and portal alignment:

In order to get to the road map and future state, the IBM consultant and portal architect had to go over a few workshops to gather the required data.

Business value alignment

It starts with the million dollar question — "What should our organization do with a portal and workplace to solve their current pain points and address the need for the future and new business demands?" We will not go into any details of this approach in this book, but we will give you the pain points to make our lifecycle story complete and give you a frame of reference for your own portal initiatives. The following diagram will provide the high-level phases to get the portal off the ground. Any portal engagement would have to apply a similar level of analysis in order to realize the portal value.

Business drivers and current state

The A2Z Bank has funded a program with PMO support to facilitate the need for governance around the portal initiative. They are in the process of being educated on the value of having such infrastructure support around the new initiatives. They want to have a POV done quickly to show how the portal value can be added within a short time to market. The major business drivers were the need for modernization and the new line of business and self-service customer channel to support. A series of workshops was done with several lines of business stake holders to cover the preceding aspects.

Current state, future state, and a road map

One of the main focuses of capturing current state is to capture the current organization processes in place at the enterprise level and understand how they can be positioned to a future state and enterprise road map that has portal capabilities in its critical path. From there, a future state can be mapped out and a demonstration can be done at a more generic level with the "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration for vertical markets. Then a POV using stubbed data from real data and service models can be used to further illustrate and demonstrate quick business-driven development with the IBM SmartCloud, WP, and WEF patterns.

Current state — pain points and how portal capabilities can fill the gap

Once the workshop and interviews that focus on documenting current internal processes, governance maturity level, and so on are all done, there is a mapping to portal and cloud capabilities, along with the demand for fast application development and value to market. The outcome of this exercise will allow the value of portal to be illustrated and imagined. The next step is to map out the demonstration of financial case to the "prospects" executive sponsors.

The following list consists of a high-level road map potential with a few critical points identified and their recommended solution provided:

  • According to the BVA, 70 percent of the A2Z IT budget goes into maintenance of current applications

  • According to the BVA, 39 percent of A2Z bugs in the system are due to misconfiguration

  • According to the BVA, 85 percent of its IT capacity sits idle

  • According to the BVA, 49 percent of the A2Z enterprise applications are not integrated but working in large IT silos and without any governance oversight

Step 3 — A "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration

In order to make the business case and demonstrate, some of the added value with portal and the cloud, a series of presentations were made available to top decision makers and stakeholders. These dynamic demonstrations are not just static PowerPoint presentations. They are full-fledged, interactive demonstrations presented via a web browser. It allows for stakeholders to relate to and anticipate that their business goals would be positively changed by portal capabilities. These are necessary steps in bringing the road map vision closer to the business case. Take your time to watch them and look at a sample that matches the industry domain for which you work. After these presentations were shown, that was a general consensus that the portal initiative would have A2Z Bullion Bank on the right road to the future. The next step was to create a financial case to show the financial gains of adopting both portal and the cloud as the new paradigms for A2Z Bullion Bank Infrastructure Technology.

Here are some links where you can read articles and watch videos, and learn more about the following topics:

Step 4 — the financial case

IBM consultants, software sales experts, and business partners can help build a financial case for an enterprise. In this case, A2Z Bullion Bank utilized the services of an IBM business partner for most of its modernization efforts. The financial case was built and shown to the CFO and his teams, along with other important executive players, such as the CTO and his teams. The financial case is an important module in the BVA exercise, as it plays the role of the major decision-maker item in a value proposition. Besides the huge financial gains, this cloud-enabled portal initiative (with fast time to market value proposition as one of the main criterion) and major pain points with which the current IT infrastructure deals and struggles with, were going to be addressed.

Stakeholders also watched online banking, multichannel banking, and payment presentations, and were highly impressed with all the capabilities that portal could bring to the table as a way to allow A2Z Bank to move into the future.

Step 5 — recommendations and next steps — POV

The next steps were laid out and agreed upon.

A POV was approved by the stakeholders, and a full project schedule and resource support allocated and dedicated to make it come to fruition.

In our sample, we will perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Use a cloud provider to quickly provision the development environment dedicated to the POV.

  2. 2. Use the WP and WEF cloud patterns to expedite the development and integration phases along with IBM Industry Toolbox.

  3. 3. Use the feedback from the BVA to drive the use cases for the POV with the assistance of a portal architect and WEF specialist.

  4. 4. Have the scope and use cases for the POV, and implementation plan reviewed and approved before moving to implementation. In this case, the POV was going to be focused on the banking channel only using data mostly from the banking template, but add some customization, and serve as a functional development sandbox for portal-related development efforts.

With a POV funded and ordered to be delivered within a timeframe, the decision was made to use the IBM development and test cloud. After that, a private cloud would be used to jump-start the physical infrastructure for the entire portal initiative lifecycle.

A program-level road map was designed and agreed upon in the following circumstances:

  1. 1. Where first phase would transfer and/or integrate some of the foundational functionality into portal information architecture for both the banking channel and the call center. It would use the new IBM X150 DataPower appliance to mediate the data entry points and functional layers via SOA reference architecture; along with the Master Data Management reference architecture.

  2. 2. Second phase would deal with portal areas such as Business Process Management (BPM), content management, Single Sign-On (SSO), and custom search. The entire program would have strong governance, Application Performance Management (APM), and business intelligence (via analytics) support. This initiative would take advantage of the cloud capabilities for its plan of business success via IT execution. Cloud patterns would be reused to expedite the environment build-out and time to market via IBM Workload Deployer (second phase BPM, SSO, search topics will be fully covered in the next edition).