BPM with SOA Helps Delta Consultants Capitalize on Change
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Most executives are scrutinizing every dollar spent on IT today. Some budget reduction decisions can significantly affect a company’s ability to stay competitive and take advantage of growth opportunities. But, for Delta Consultants, the urgent need to revamp its market-leading environmental health and safety application, IntelligentEHS (iEHS), and the company’s assessment of the longer-term return of business value trumped concerns about cost or timing. The environmental consulting firm’s application was ten years old, and lacked the flexibility, customization and dynamic capabilities that would help keep Delta Consultants competitive.

With rivals around the world ready to capitalize on rising demand for effective compliance solutions from businesses in petroleum, chemical, and other highly regulated industries, Delta Consultants knew it needed to act fast to modernize the 10 year-old iEHS product. What the business needed was more than an application refresh; Delta Consultants’ iEHS needed a transformation that would allow it to catch up to demand for effective and highly customizable products for meeting regulatory requirements, industry mandates and internal governance dictates.

The company made a radical departure from the way it had always designed, deployed and managed its application, abandoning the old-world model of static development. Instead, Delta Consultants turned to a more modern strategy that would design software around business processes themselves using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create a more flexible and extensible environment. Business process management (BPM) using SOA applies a business perspective to software design, using Web services to connect software components responsible for discrete processes to create an IT environment that allows for continuous change and optimization.

The company turned to IBM and PointSource LLC, an IBM IT consulting partner specializing in application lifecycle management, to redesign its legacy iEHS application. PointSource is focused on BPM enabled by SOA and Composite Application Lifecycle Management. Using IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric and WebSphere Services Registry and Repository as the foundation, IBM and PointSource created a modular software development environment that Delta Consultants can use to expedite deployment of new business processes by reusing application components. This new environment preserves the company’s existing investments by exposing legacy IT assets for use in support of business services.

The environment PointSource and IBM created enables quick and efficient change; the application components underlying the discrete services now work together, making it easier for organizations to continuously revise end-to-end processes. The business process-centric application environment is also more conducive to efficient software design from a human resource perspective, allowing programming teams to be allocated by process, database, user interface, or any other function that needs to be addressed.

The result is a more efficient development model and a more dynamic, customizable and effective application. Delta Consultants can now create specific changes to meet widely varying customer requirements around issues such as industry or regional metrics while leveraging common underlying application components. For example, the firm can now create Sustainability Reporting Frameworks around the different metrics (such as the Global Reporting Initiative or the Dow Jones Sustainability Index) that businesses use to benchmark their performance economically, environmentally, or even in terms of social consciousness.

The new environment makes it possible for Delta Consultants to capitalize on demand for tailored applications without having to spend big on back-end application programming. The company can also get new features out to its customers more quickly, thanks to faster development time and simplified provisioning.

Delta Consultants will be able to integrate any new features with its existing portals. Its customers will see more sophisticated roles-based capabilities that accommodate the particular requirements of a specific user.

Delta Consultants expects to realize another important dividend from its work with PointSource and IBM: The new application can scale to meet higher volume, allowing the firm to market iEHS to a new customer set. As a result, the company will be able to compete better in its usual markets and seize new opportunities that arise.

Combining BPM with SOA provides the technology foundation to support agile business operations, and agility is essential for any company that wants to remain at the top of its game. Whether racing to keep pace during a boom year, battling for every customer on an uneven playing field, or contending with mass market stagnation, every business needs to know how to translate market changes — and challenges — into success.

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