** Introduction: ** This article is a brief review of the development of the Zhongtai architecture so far, and introduces the typical business architecture of the enterprise zhongtai, hoping that readers have a basic understanding of the concept of zhongtai.
Digital transformation needs a scientific architecture and system to support its landing and sustainable development. Judging from the actual cases and feedback from the digital transformation teams of various enterprises, the mid-platform architecture is the core architecture preferred by the vast majority of enterprises in the process of landing digital transformation.
Alibaba group in 2015 to start the strategy of China, has been in the past five years, many enterprises through the face-to-face communication, the cloud conference summit and all kinds of BBS, and all kinds of books, articles, such as way to understand and study the architecture of China, but there are still some enterprises leaders, architects, especially the lack of practice in China a little knowledge, Even produce the deviation of understanding.
As an early promoter of zhongtai architecture in the industry, I have witnessed that zhongtai architecture has made great progress in both theoretical system and practical methodology after years of practice and development. This paper first makes a simple introduction to the development process and concept of zhongtai enterprise.
As for why Alibaba Group started the Strategy of China and the evolution process of the actual structure, I have made a detailed elaboration in the book “How to Transform Enterprise IT Architecture”. In December 2015, Alibaba Group announced the launch of the Strategy of China Central Taiwan. In order to play the strategic value of China Central Taiwan more efficiently, the group has carried out a series of organizational structure adjustments.
Overall, from the early hatched “bargain” the innovation of the business, to today’s “nailing”, lazada (alibaba group purchase of southeast Asia’s largest electric business platform), “hungry?” (alibaba group in 2018 to buy take-out platform), these platforms can quickly into the technical and business system of the alibaba group, The middle platform structure plays a decisive role in the Internet, and has become a solid chassis for Alibaba Group to maintain efficient innovation and exploration in the Internet field.
The implementation of the China-Taiwan strategy naturally requires a set of scientific technology and business architecture to support it. I am a staunch supporter of SOA. SOA is a scientific architecture that has been verified by the industry at present and can truly give enterprises quick response and innovation ability, including the “micro services” architecture that is in full swing now is also a more suitable technical route for SOA methodology in the Internet-oriented scenario.
The theoretical basis of mid-stage architecture is SOA, which effectively precipitates core business capabilities in the way of services and realizes the reuse of business capabilities in different scenarios. In my opinion, this “reuse” is the greatest value of SOA.
If an enterprise wants to achieve really fast business response, especially the improvement of new business support efficiency, if it does not do precipitation at the business level, but only precipitation and improvement at the pure technical level (development framework, UI specification, computing resource pool, etc.), the improvement of work efficiency is still limited.
Because if just ready in technical aspect, so business or starting from 0, and if did precipitation in the business level, a new system could be 30% ~ 40% of core business services and data models are ready, only need assembly based on the existing services and the expansion to achieve the demand of the new system, This method must be far more efficient than the other one.
As of the end of 2019, as far as I know, dozens of traditional enterprises in China have carried out their own construction in The middle Taiwan by referring to alibaba Group’s construction concept and experience. In the process of communication and cooperation with these enterprises, I am often asked a question: “Since there are proposed in Taiwan, will naturally think of the foreground and background, facing users and terminal system can be included in the foreground, so what is the background?”
This question does make many people confused, and Alibaba Group in the launch of the strategy in Taiwan, did not mention what is behind the scenes.
In traditional enterprises and a number of business and systems research, we found that not all the business is the pursuit of rapid strain and innovation, opening and sharing, and some business after is streamline, standardization, emphasizes the central control, and user groups is the enterprise internal staff of the business, there will be no high concurrency, huge amounts of data, such a scenario.
From the construction goal and value of the center, the center is to provide the most efficient business support capability when the front-end business changes and new business exploration. ** In combination with the previous research results and the value highlighting perspective of Zhongtai, I compiled a chart two years ago, as shown in FIG. 1-1, in which there is a general evaluation standard for which businesses should be included in the background.
▲ Figure 1-1 External loose, internal tight become the evaluation criteria for the division of middle and background
For those users is the enterprise internal staff, emphasize the rigor of the transaction, emphasizes the process standards, can control the system, with OA (Office Automation, Office Automation), finance, human resources management system, is not can’t construction in China, but such a system based on business value brought by the construction of China is not large, If such a system can still perform good business functions in the enterprise, it will continue to operate and maintain the use, put in the background is more suitable.
Some business need fast response, along with the market and the needs of users to quickly adjust and strain, in order to construct ecological system, also need to will open sharing of enterprise core competence, often face high concurrent access and huge amounts of data reading and writing, especially in electric business platform, CRM (customer relationship management (CRM), marketing platform, This kind of business is very suitable for the construction of mid-Taiwan architecture, which can give full play to the value of continuous precipitation of mid-Taiwan business and rapid support for business innovation. We call this measure of whether a business is suitable for construction based on zhongtai “loose on the outside, tight on the inside”.
Based on such service division standards, figure 1-2 shows the typical architecture for ****. We will tend to finance, human resources, production and manufacturing, product design as a background business, such as the middle office is responsible for the core business and the data of precipitation, operation, support up front desk of the various business platform construction, such as electricity, POS, CRM, marketing platform, distribution platform, etc., whole China will include “China business” and “China” data.
If you need to open core services and data of an enterprise to third-party platforms and applications, you can open them through the Capability Open Platform.
▲ Figure 1-2 Typical architecture diagram of enterprise mid-stage (early)
From the point of today, this architecture makes a lot of people have a misunderstanding, think that China is only suitable for marketing the business scenario, not suitable for other business areas, such as manufacturing, engineering construction, but in recent years of production management, production process of platform construction in the field of view, China architecture concept in this business scenario can also play a role, Because the essence of China is through the unified data, real-time and on-line implementation of the whole business chain through real time linkage, personalized demand expansion and business value, such as all business systems in the enterprise’s whole business chain, the optimization of the parts of the business chain business in the future is bound to spread to other parts of the business, make the changes and adjustments.
Over the past few years, we suggest that first will be geared to the needs of the market and client’s business to China, because these business better play to the role of the middle office, wait until after this part of the business become flexible, fast enough, is bound to reversed transmission after the supply chain, manufacturing, product design, etc., make the changes, but the arrival of the change of time, sooner or later, Enterprises should judge whether they can accept the input-output ratio after the transformation of these systems.
At present, there have been many enterprises based on the China architecture for production management, product design, supply chain field, the advantage of the characteristics of China architecture to realize the business chain business linkage and meet the personalized requirements of rapid response, so according to the trend of development, there will be a lot of enterprise’s overall business in China architecture system, All businesses on the business chain are based on the construction of the middle stage, there is no so-called background.
** If there is a “backend” at all, the backend refers to common technology platforms such as infrastructure (IaaS), big data, middleware (PaaS), etc. ** Figure 1-3 more accurately depicts the mid-platform architecture.
▲ Figure 1-3 Typical service architecture of an enterprise
“Business Center” and “data Center” will provide corresponding services for different scenarios, so as to build different business products, such as middleware, IoT, big data platform and other general technology components are classified into the category of technology Center, supplemented by corresponding business, digital assets operating platform.