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1. What is a business center
The business center is to divide the boundaries of the business field, form a highly cohesive and low-coupling business-oriented competence center, and create a continuously evolving enterprise-level business capability sharing service platform. The intuitive presentation of the business center is the various competence centers. Taking Internet e-commerce as an example, common ones include trading centers, commodity centers, and inventory centers. It not only provides rich shared services, but also includes methods and mechanisms for systematically building enterprise capability domains. The business middle platform is not only a development and design platform for the production of upper-level applications, but also a platform for configuring, arranging and expanding business objects, business capabilities, business rules and business processes, and completing the operation and management of enterprise resources. It provides a high-concurrency and high-availability execution environment for the stable operation of the upper-layer application system.
The construction of enterprise business middle platform is a systematic project. Zhongtai has its own architecture system. So what is the main architectural style of Zhongtai? To sum it up is: vertical segmentation, horizontal layering.
Vertical segmentation refers to the vertical segmentation of the business content of enterprises in China and Taiwan according to different fields and whether they can operate independently. For multiple business fields of different sizes and not rigorous after cutting, the middle station will conduct a series of technical analysis, abstraction, classification, and deduction to form a business that can be operated independently and contains multiple technical aspects. A system of microservices. Each system after segmentation is generally referred to as the competence center of the middle office. Such as the common user center, product center, order center, contract center, transaction center, inventory center, channel center, marketing center, etc. Each competence center supports different business domains, and all domain objects in it have a direct aggregation relationship with the business domains.
2. Why do you need a business center
In the early days of the information age, due to the relatively single business, the problems of enterprise IT system construction were not exposed. But in the middle and late stages, with the rapid expansion of enterprise scale and business, in order to quickly support business management and operation, each business department can only develop their own business systems in parallel. Although this approach solved the urgent need of the enterprise at the time, in the long run, the digital capability resources of the enterprise were isolated in multiple independent IT systems. These digital capability resources cannot be empowered across systems and businesses, nor can all business data be shared and invoked in real time.
As a shared service platform, the digital middle platform provides the data and capabilities that were originally repeatedly built in multiple independent IT systems to various business departments in a shared manner. Let's take the three system modules of member center, message center and basic data center as examples. In the past, enterprises had the functions of these three modules in multiple business systems, but the data generated by these functions were maintained in their respective business systems and could not be integrated and used. Now through the middle platform, we can abstract the membership system, member information, member loyalty, membership level, member rights and interests, and member points into the general business capabilities of the member center; The point type is abstracted as configurable items; the ability to abstract member site notifications, SMS notifications of registered members, etc. as a message center. In this way, the middle platform not only meets the needs of different business systems, but also quickly and effectively integrates existing digital capability resources.
3. Understanding of the business platform
For the cognition of the business platform, the following three points need to be clarified.
3.1. Microservices are not business platforms
"Microservice" is a popular technical architecture today, and the connotation of the business platform is not only a technical architecture, but also an organizational-level business architecture.
First of all, the middle platform as a technical architecture reflects the middle platform system that this book focuses on, but in a broad sense, it can also be a kind of enterprise organization management model and concept. On the basis of "centralization", the middle office builds isolated and decentralized front-end business, and connects these businesses.
Secondly, the business center combines the idea of overall planning of the system theory, and splits the system in vertical and horizontal directions. It absorbs the vertical split application method of microservices "according to business areas" to form a "high cohesion, low coupling" capability center; and then on the basis of vertical splits, it horizontally isolates the business middle platform from business applications, It has created the sharing concept of China and Taiwan, making it beyond the scope of microservices. Vertically split services within the middle platform, reducing the degree of coupling between domains. The horizontal isolation of the middle platform and the upper-level applications promotes the cross-sharing of business and data among various applications, greatly reducing redundant construction and repeated investment, and thus creates sustainable accumulation and operation of corporate assets. Therefore, the middle platform has become a The new infrastructure for digital and intelligent transformation of enterprises.
Therefore, microservices are not business platforms, but microservices are not completely separated from business platforms. Microservices are the best practice for building a business center capability center at the technical level.
3.2. The business platform is not a front-end application
The foreground application consists of two parts: the foreground interactive interface and the foreground application service. The foreground application service refers to a set of functional units that provide a backend service interface for the foreground interactive interface. The business middle platform generally does not directly face the front-end interface, but faces the front-end application service, providing it with a shared service interface. The functions provided by the front-end application service have application limitations and particularities, and are generally required to complete a specific business scenario. In contrast, the business middle platform completes the common parts of multiple business scenarios, as well as mounts and executes extended functions for specific front-end businesses. Generally speaking, the front-end application service will arrange and convert the middle-end capabilities according to the special needs of the front-end business scenarios, and then provide them to the front-end interface for use.
3.3. Business middle platform is the realization of general business mechanism
An important difference between the business platform shared service and the front-end application service is that the business platform realizes the functions of the common part of the business scenario. This part of general functions is a common business operation mechanism formed by abstracting different front-end businesses, and solves the common problems of front-end businesses. This general business operation mechanism is one of the core contents of the business platform. Zhongtai focuses on the abstraction and implementation of general mechanisms, so Zhongtai is universal and inclusive. Combined with dynamically modifiable configuration items, the middle platform solves the problem of business personalization through the isolation of business space. That is to use a common mechanism to support different businesses at the same time, so as to ensure the openness of the platform in the business.