Enterprise Information System

Case Study

The following case study is to provide insight on how the components can work together in an enterprise information system. This case study site is where the concepts for eContent were developed in order to meet the need for accessing financial reports, OLAP reports, and other resources necessary for the business functions. The need was for historical and current reports and resources to be maintained, as well as running reports on the fly from the data warehouse, a notification system enabled subscribed users to be advised by email when certain reports were published.

Function of the Case Enterprise Information System

The corporate enterprise informations system (EIS) in this case study is a collection of servers providing Web-based services to users company-wide. The EIS is, in additional to a means of disseminating information, also the medium by which most users will interact with the Decision Support System (DSS).  The following are the components and factors contributing to our case company.

Data Warehouse

The data warehouse is the name given to a single database of information collected from disparate front-end systems throughout the organization. The unique characteristic of the data warehouse is that it provides a single point of access to information from many different systems, so this information can be combined & compared meaningfully. In this example, the data warehouse is stored using a Microsoft SQL Server relational database.

Decision Support System

The Decision Support System (DSS) is a collection of tools and facilities that provides access to the data stored in the data warehouse in a variety of easy-to-use ways. Primarily the decision support system is for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) queries, not really for detailed reports.

Target Users

The users for corporate EIS and the DSS are primarily in 5 physical locations. There are also, however a small but growing number of remote users and dial-in users.

The corporate EIS so far has been targeted mostly towards executive-level users, but it is intended that other levels of management will begin using the analysis and reporting capabilities of corporate EIS. A general news and events capability is also proposed, which would broaden the user base to effectively all PC users in the company.

Architecture

Company X, a large mutli-national company has combined the components of Jcorporate into their corporate EIS which also is used for a decision support system (DSS).  There are a number of different servers involved in supporting the corporate EIS and the DSS, each providing different parts of the overall solution. All of the components in the production system are duplicated in the development system, but on a single server at this time.

Some of the components and their interactions are:

Content Topics
Case Function
Data Warehouse
Decision Support System
Target Users
bullet Architecture
bullet Tools & Technologies

Intranet ROI 

Results from IDC's return on investment study of intranets found the typical ROI well over 1000% -- far higher that usually found with any technology investment. Adding to the benefit, with payback periods ranging from six to twelve weeks, the cost of an intranet is quickly recovered -- making the associated risk low. In addition to the obvious savings of paper or supporting ISO 9000 initiatives, the greatest savings is productivity.

MS SQL Server
  • Store data (data warehouse)
  • Provide data to PAS as required
  • Store control & setup tables

ORB
  • Provide a communication medium for the application framework
  • Provide a communication medium for the servlet runner (for CORBA servlets)
  • Allow cross-platform operation with other CORBA applications (future)

Servlet Enabled Web Server
  • Provide dynamic web content
  • Provide forms for control table maintenance
  • Provide an interface to the application framework
  • Provide web pages to clients

NT Scheduler
  • Allow timed jobs to be passed to application framework

Adobe Acrobat

  • Convert print files (i.e. received from AS/400) to web-compatible format


Tools and Technologies Used

Technology choices for corporate EIS and the decision support system (DSS) were made in such a way as to allow for platform-independence, to allow for later scalability. For example, it may be desirable to move the web server portion of corporate EIS to a Unix-based system in the future, or to i.e. an AS/400. All of the technologies currently used would allow this.

NT Server

 NT Server is the backbone OS for the corporate EIS/DSS servers in our example; and a critical part of the data warehouse data is extracted from legacy and unix systems.

Internet Information Server

 Basic HTTP web services are provided by this package, on several systems throughout corporate EIS. From the users perspective there is only one "corporate EIS", but in actual fact hyperlinks can redirect the user to & from various physical servers as required.

Crystal Reports & Crystal Web

 Crystal Reports is a general-purpose report writing tool, similar in function and features to Sybase's InfoMaker. Crystal also has a product that adds on to Crystal Reports and makes possible the running of Crystal Report from a browser. The actual data processing takes place on the server, and the resulting report is presented to the user as either HTML or as an ActiveX control in his/her browser window.

Publishing New Crystal reports on Corporate EIS: Users will begin creating new reports in Crystal, and may ask to have these reports published on corporate EIS. There are two methods of doing so, either as a "runnable" report, or as a "static" report. A "runnable" report must have a hyperlink to activate it created in an applicable place on corporate EIS. A static report must have report number created for the report in ePortal.

Pilot

 Pilot is an OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) database server and related tools. Basically Pilot extracts data from the data warehouse and consolidates and summarizes it into easy-to-use views called "Dimensions".

Pilot Internet Publisher

 PIP is a middleware product that allows web clients to access Pilot Analysis Server capabilities from within their web browsers, in a manner similar to Crystal Web.

Expresso Application Framework

and eContent

 A customized extensible framework that monitors and runs jobs from a job queue. The job queue is maintained in a table in the data warehouse, and jobs are added to the queue by interactive forms (see Servlet Runner below) and by scheduled tasks (via batch files). The application framework launches the appropriate application to service the request, which may be another custom program, Excel, or any other application, both NT-based and potentially on the AS/400 and Unix systems. The framework also handles logging messages from the request, and clears the entry from the job queue when it is completed. An interrupted job (e.g. if the server is rebooted or restarted during a job) is automatically restarted. Some jobs are also monitored for a timeout – e.g. they are only allowed to run for a certain time before they are terminated & a notification sent.

ORB

 The ORB or Object Request Broker is a middleware component that provides a communication medium for the application framework to interact with other CORBA-enabled and DCOM-enabled applications (DCOM is the competing Microsoft standard comparable in some ways with CORBA). The ORB requires a fixed port number to "listen" on, and responds to requests for services on this port. The application framework and any applications that communicate with the ORB must know this port number and the name of the server for communications to be established. This is very similar to MS SQL Server, which also listens on a port number.

Servlet Runner

 The servlet system allows dynamic web content to be added to corporate EIS. This includes the forms used for most corporate EIS administration, and the forms used to request runs of report sets. The servlet runner program enables servlets to be executed, and must remain running on port 8080 (reserved for special HTTP services) at all times. A link is provided on the admin page to check for operation of the servlet runner.

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Last Modified: 30-Jan-01