Business Objects

Measuring effectiveness. Results are measured against technology and business objectives the metrics chosen determine the proper behavior and actions. 

Tangible support means not only resources but also standing relative to other company priorities. PSM needs legitimacy as a business objective to hold its own in situations requiring a trade-off between long-term process improvement and short-term commercial considerations. No matter how deeply committed safety professionals may be, this legitimacy can only be conferred by top management, who ultimately must make those trade-off decisions. 

Guide the process of setting PSM goals that support our business objectives ... 

Organizing the elements of tasks and work processes to attain business objectives. 

Defining roles, priorities and processes with respect to achieving business objectives. 

Identifying and addressing deficits in employee knowledge, skills and abilities to enhance performance and to attain business objectives. 

It is easy to envisage both immutable and mutable versions of many types a Date object whose attributes you can change, or a set you can move things in and out of (see Figure 2.8). Often a reasonable model could be built with either type. However, models of a mutable Date object often should instead use a mutable object, such as Clock, whose today attribute refers to different date objects as time passes.4 Most interesting domain or business objects are naturally mutable—for example, Customer, Machine, Clock. 

CORBA Facilities (vertical) Standards for business objects in vertical domains, including health care, telecomm, financials, and so on... 

Legacy adapter This thin layer shields business objects from idiosyncrasies of the legacy system and its representations. 

There are various ways to build and connect user interfaces to business objects. The scheme you use depends largely on your user-interface frameworks. Following is a simple scheme broken into two main phases configuration (creates and connects the appropriate objects) and run (user interacts with the widgets). 

Create one application object. This object coordinates and mediates among the UI widgets and between the widgets and the business objects. The application object is created at the appropriate point in the dialog flow in contrast, the business objects are created from persistent storage. 

The application object registers itself as an observer for the relevant business objects. When they change they update the application object, which updates the widgets if necessary (see Figure 12.6). 

The application object makes necessary changes to its state to reflect the progress of the interaction dialog then it generates a command to the business object then it propagates updates to the widgets. 

Devise an event protocol to make these elements composable. For example, each application object checks with its container before it sends commands to its business objects. 

In most applications the state of the business objects must persist even when the process or application that created them exits. There are three main approaches to providing this persistence. 

The technical architecture Apackage structure (for static dependencies) and collaborations (across technology components, such as UI, business object servers, and databases). These cover all domain-independent parts of the system hardware and software platforms infrastructure components such as middleware and databases utilities for logging, exceptions, start-up, and shutdown design standards and tools and the choice of... 

The business case This provides initial requirements, defining the business problem or opportunity that this project addresses. It typically includes a high-level list of numbered functional and nonfunctional requirements2 (lb), the business reasons and risks for the project (la), the scope of the project in terms of things definitely included or excluded, linked clearly to a business model in terms of business objectives, actions or use cases, and user roles that must be supported (la), known requirements on the architecture, design, and implementation (lc), and constraints on project budget and schedules (Id). 

Other cycles can be horizontal one that does not deliver new user-visible functionality but instead carries a minimal use case through increasingly deep layers of the application and infrastructure components, exercising all communication channels. An example is a single user interaction carried from the user interface through the business object layer via an object request broker (ORB) to the applicable databases and back. 

This chapter and the next two chapters illustrate the use of Catalysis on a sample problem and discuss the how-to of applying Catalysis. This chapter focuses on building a business model this is usually the model of a problem domain or business and not of a software business object layer sitting behind a user interface. The software objects in the subsequent chapters are based on the business objects, and a naming scheme is used to associate them. 

In this scenario, we have highlighted the commits of major transactions on the video store system these are points at which the interaction is not just with the user interface, and not just reading the business core but represent important changes to the state of business objects in the software. These will be the actions we focus on first when we specify the system s behavior. 

The GUI involves more than one class—usually several classes for every kind of shape and display and every displayed business object. So we are talking here about another substantial component. Considerations that apply to the user interface also apply to interfaces to other external objects, so an interface to a separate component would also use a fagade. Once these fagades have been separated out, we are left with a core component in the middle that reflects the business types and represents the business logic in its code. 

Make a layer of business objects. In a client-server system, they typically reside on the server (although this strategy is independent of their location). The business objects correspond closely to the types found in the business model and deal with users concepts, roles, departments, and so on (see Figure 16.5). As the business changes, it is this layer that is updated. 

The GUI is a separate layer. In contrast to an older client-server (two-layer) architecture, the user interface should deal only with presenting business objects to users and translating user typing, mouse clicks, and so on to business object commands. Business rules should be embodied within the business objects. 

The first benefit is platform independence. The business objects can be written independently of the legacy systems and can be ported. Using middleware, you can integrate new application components with existing application code and purchase components to build seamless business systems. 

Software location also tracks business location. Distribution of the objects among hosts comes after and is independent of object design (see Pattern 16.12, Object Locality and Link Implementation). This applies whether there is a central server or several servers or whether the business objects are hosted on server machines or clients or in their own machines. The strength of this independence is that the hosting can easily be rearranged— dynamically, if appropriate—as people and departments are relocated. 

Presentation of the state of the core to the external world will be handled appropriately by the facade. It will use observers (see Pattern 16.17, Observer) so that we need not consider the detail about how things appear on the screen. All we need do is keep the business objects own state right. 

Business risks—The risk that production or other business objective will be impaired because of unplanned incidents. 

To undeiBtand the significance of our role and the part we play in customer satisfaction and business objectives... 

This VIP reduces capital investment by confirming minimum required capacities and flexibility necessary only to meet current project business objectives. The workshop drills down to each specific system and subsystem and finally scrutinizes the design of each equipment item. This workshop is often combined with the value engineering VIP, which overlaps significantly. The design to capacity VIP should be conducted in the definition phase (FEL-3) when the first issue of P IDs is available. 

EEL (front-end loading) The process by which a company develops a detailed definition of the scope of a capital project that meets corporate business objectives. 

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