Recently I've been asked about if the Lending Message Bus (LMB) supports other standards other than MISMO. The answer is... of course it does. The LMB can support one or more standards. This is due to the modular design of the adapter and accelerator framework within BizTalk Server.
So let's take a step back, what are accelerators. This doesn't get communicated very well. At the highest level accelerators are based on an adapter, for example the MISMO accelerator is based on the XML adapter. The difference between an adapter and accelerators is that an adapter is much lower on the stack. Adapters deal with XML or File transformations and accelerators are about mapping that data to support message routing or high level business processes.
Since maps are used for accelerators that means that they are coupled with an orchestration. So what you see above are autonomous accelerators that can be added to the lending message bus. Since they are autonomous, adding and removing does not effect the other standards accelerators.
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The accelerator maps enable you to utilize the adapters to translate and transform messages. Translation is the process of converting a message from one format to another format, such as converting a flat file into an XML file. Transformation is the process of taking information from one message and inserting it in another message.
Note: Maps are tightly coupled with an orchestration. You can not have a map dynamically spin off other orchestrations. This is taken into consideration below.
How should you architect support for multiple standards?
You want to make sure that you keep the accelerators very thin. The schema maps should only take care of translation and transformation to become usable by a set of course grained services. So in essence you have two layers of orchestrations.
The first layer handle the movement of the information in the lending message bus. The second layer of orchestrations for the consumption into enterprise business processes. The rational for this is to separate the translation services from the business services.
We want to avoid blending these two layers together for the following reasons:
- Unnecessary duplication of code
- Siloed standards support
- Constraints on multi-channel integration
- Time to deliver standards support is impacted due to the amount of duplicate application logic
Are there any available accelerators for the Lending Message Bus?
Yes, Additional standards for Commercial Lending have already been developed by Microsoft Consulting Services built in the Commercial Lending Framework (CLF). This requires an MCS engagement to purchase the accelerator.
There have been some discussions of the creation of both a British and Australian (LIXI) accelerator. Stay tuned for more news on that.
[Update]
Gartner wrote a similar article on their site that aligns with the guidance in the Loan Orgiantion Reference Architecture.
- The Lending Services Hub - Lending Architecture of the Future
- Banks must Rethink their Lending Architectures
