BPM-EAI

Here is a small anecdote from one of my colleagues talking about his past experience. It was a season of outsourcing in a major F500 company and they outsourcing for the first time. The expectations ran high and a simple task of generating a report from an application was considered a “great” achievement at cost cutting. As Murphy would have it, that day when the demo of the “outsourced team” developed report generation tool was being showcased to the higher-ups, the manager drew a blank report on the screen.

As you might have guessed by now, somewhere the data link got lost and this had to be fixed immediately (say with-in 10-15 minutes). The Infrastructure team that was responsible for the database and the data sink mentioned that data was intact and the query too was a success. The portal team which was responsible for “display” of the report on the screen mentioned that the data did not reach the said rendering component. So everyone made the poor EAI team the fall guy.

Then started the great hunt for the vanishing data! Query was checked manually and the results were accurate as expected. Even the queue through which the message (with results) was to be passed also worked well. Now the puzzle remained as to where the data had gone, as the message subscribing utility which picks up the message from queue and places it as a file too worked well and placed the file on the disk. The file picking utility from the application server picked the file and deleted the same within the SLA time meant for the same and yet the data is not being rendered on the screen. Everyone mentioned that something went wrong on the EAI side, as they are the only folks who talk to every application owner to get things going.

The onus of debugging the entire supply chain of data fell on my colleague and he started out testing each of the components and writing his own code mimicking the components. Finally he found that the file being picked up by the application server was having 0-bytes and on further digging into the case found that the disk had some bad sectors and the files were getting corrupted.

Had it been the case that an EAI specialist was only a specialist in his/her tool alone, say Tibco/webMethods/Vitria/MessageBroker the case would not have been resolved. An EAI specialist means, he/she not only needs to know his/her tool of specialization but also should know JAVA/C/C++, with at least one scripting language, say PERL/TCL and some working knowledge of testing with idea about quality.

Hence we at Infosys have a dedicated Academy for all of the BPM-EAI folks as a part of larger Enterprise Solutions Academy, where the generalist with specialist like skills are imparted to the consultants.