WebSphere Information
Services Director in a business context
By enabling integration tasks as services, WebSphere® Information Services Director
is a critical component of the application development and integration environment.
The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure of WebSphere Information
Services Director ensures that data integration logic that is developed in IBM® Information
Server can be used by any business process. The best data is available at
all times, to all people, and to all processes.
The following categories represent common uses of WebSphere Information Services Director
in a business context:
Real-time data warehousing
Enables companies to publish their existing data integration logic as
services that can be called in real time from any process. This type of warehousing
enables users to perform analytical processing and loading of data based on
transaction triggers, ensuring that time-sensitive data in the warehouse is
completely current.
Matching services
Enables data integration logic to be packaged as a shared service that
can be called by enterprise application integration platforms. This type of
service allows reference data such as customer, inventory, and product data
to be matched to and kept current with a master store with each transaction.
In-flight transformation
Enables enrichment logic to be packaged as shared services so that capabilities
such as product name standardization, address validation, or data format transformations
can be shared and reused across projects.
Enterprise data services
Enables the data access functions of many applications to be aggregated
and shared in a common service layer. Instead of each application creating
its own access code, these services can be reused across projects, simplifying
development and ensuring a higher level of consistency. One
of the major advantages of this approach is that you can combine data integration
tasks with the leading enterprise messaging, Enterprise Application Integration
(EAI), and Business Process Management (BPM) products by using binding choices.
Because most middleware products support Web services, there are often
multiple options for how this support is done. For example, WebSphere integration
products such as WebSphere Federation Server or WebSphere Business
Integration Message Broker can invoke WebSphere Information Services Director
to access service-ready jobs.
The following examples show how organizations use WebSphere Information Services Director
to improve efficiency and validate information in real time.
Pharmaceutical industry: Improving efficiency
A leading pharmaceutical company needed to include real-time data from
clinical labs in its research and development reports. The company used WebSphere DataStage™ to
define a transformation process for XML documents from labs. This process
used SOA to expose the transformation as a Web service, allowing labs to send
data and receive an immediate response. Pre-clinical data is now available
to scientific personnel earlier, allowing lab scientists to select which data
to analyze. Now, only the best data is chosen, greatly improving scientists’
efficiency.
Insurance Industry: Validating addresses in real time
An international insurance data services company employs IBM Information
Server to validate and enrich property addresses by using Web services. As
insurance companies submit lists of addresses for underwriting, services standardize
the addresses based on their rules, validate each address, match the addresses
to a list of known addresses, and enrich the addresses with additional information
that helps with underwriting decisions. The company now automates 80 percent
of the process and eliminated most of the errors. The project was simplified
by using the WebSphere Information
Services Director capabilities of IBM Information Server and the standardization
and matching capabilities of WebSphere QualityStage.
IBM Information Server, Version 8.1
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