Learn About Building a Governance Application

You can build a process governance application that creates, integrates, and reviews approval processes within a company. For example, various business processes require a governance process, where someone with approval authority can review certain artifacts, raise questions or issues, and get clarifications, before approving the artifacts.

In a sales team, you might want to ensure that upper management has an opportunity to review and approve a sales plan. In a product development team, you might want to provide project managers a formal mechanism to approve a project plan. In a communication team, you might want to ensure that the right messaging is being conveyed by allowing stakeholders to review documents, raise questions and concerns, and seek responses from the document owners. In each of these scenarios, you want to be sure that the right people have an opportunity to review certain items, seek clarifications, review responses to their questions, and only when they are satisfied, allow those items or artifacts to progress to the next stage of their lifecycle.

Before you begin building a governance application, read Learn how to access data from an Oracle Mobile Hub application

Architecture

This architecture shows how you can create an audit and governance application using a combination of Oracle Cloud platform services.

Description of the illustration audit_application_architecture.png

• Custom REST resources such as reports or audit artifacts are created and exposed by an external software as a service (SaaS) application.

• Oracle Mobile Hub provides a façade API layer to access and cache the data from the external SaaS application REST APIs.

• Oracle Visual Builder, which is part of the enterprise edition of Oracle Integration, allows you to build a user interface that provides access to the data, and consumes REST services from the Oracle Mobile Hub façade API layer in a secure way. It also allows reviewer and approver auditors to view the data and create a collection of questions.

• The Process component, which is part of the Enterprise edition of Oracle Integration, is used to implement a workflow that sends the collection of questions to the original auditor. Original auditors can then respond to the questions and resubmit the data for approval.

Workflow

The architecture implements the following example workflow.

An auditing company performs various types of compliance audits for its customers. These audits might be performed by independent contractors. The auditing company wants to implement a four-eyes approach. That is, they want to ensure that one of their senior auditors is assigned to review the audits performed by the independent contractors. The senior auditor might have some questions for the original auditor. These questions are sent back to the original auditors, who might need to modify the audit reports and respond to the questions. This could be an iterative process. When all the questions are answered and the senior auditor is satisfied, the audit report is approved and sent to the customer.

Description of the illustration audit_application_workflow.png

About Required Services, Components and Roles

This solution requires the following services:

• The enterprise edition of Oracle Integration Service, which includes the Process and Oracle Visual Builder features.

• Oracle Oracle Mobile Hub

Your Oracle Visual Builder instance must be associated with the Oracle Process Cloud Service instance of your Oracle Integration Service. Oracle Visual Builder administrators can create the association between the services.

These are the roles needed for each service.

Service Name: Role	Required to...
Oracle Visual Builder: Administrator	Associate an Oracle Visual Builder with an Oracle Process Cloud Service instance.
Oracle Cloud: Identity domain Administrator	To manage mobile users, roles, and realms.
Oracle Mobile Hub: MobileEnvironment_MobileUserConfig and MobileEnvironment_MobileUserMgmt team member roles	To manage mobile users, roles, and realms.

See Learn how to get Oracle Cloud services for Oracle Solutions to get the cloud services you need.

About Oracle Mobile Hub

Developing simple mobile applications is common, but connecting those apps to backend systems and services can get complicated. Oracle Mobile Hub is a cloud-based service that provides a unified hub for developing, deploying, maintaining, monitoring, and analyzing your mobile apps and the resources that they rely on.

Oracle Mobile Hub streamlines mobile development initiatives and provides everything you need to establish an enterprise mobile strategy using innovative, persona-based tools and services. It helps you define mobile APIs and build mobile apps that connect to enterprise systems quickly and securely while providing the deep analytics needed to make smart, data-driven decisions. It links mobile developers with enterprise data sources, and empowers you to create engaging mobile experiences in a simple, straightforward manner.

Without Oracle Mobile Hub, mobile application developers must become integration developers in order to connect mobile apps to enterprise systems. They must also become security experts in order to connect to each of these enterprise systems by using the correct security technology. Using Oracle Mobile Hub eliminates the need for mobile application developers to be experts in everything; they can develop mobile apps much faster, decreasing application development times and costs. It also provides metrics that allow you to analyze how successful your mobile strategy is.

About Oracle Visual Builder

Oracle Visual Builder is a visual and declarative cloud environment for developing and hosting engaging mobile and web applications. It provides easy access to data from any REST-based service, and enables you to create custom reusable business objects for storing and managing data.

Using the cloud-based visual development tools, you can create and test responsive web applications and native mobile apps without installing any additional software. The visual designer enables you to quickly lay out pages in your applications by dragging and dropping UI components, customizing their attributes, and defining their behavior.

Oracle Visual Builder also provides the following tools for building and publishing applications:

• Data management tools for managing business objects and importing and exporting data

• Publishing tools for staging and publishing your applications

• Advanced tools for configuring role-based security and user access management

• Collaboration tools for sharing application resources between team members

• Robust tools for describing requests and responses to Oracle software as a service (SaaS) REST services in the integrated catalog

About Oracle Integration Service

Oracle Integration Service is a complete, secure, lightweight integration solution that enables you to connect your applications in the cloud.

Oracle Integration Service provides secure, enterprise-grade connectivity regardless of the applications you're connecting or where they reside. It simplifies connectivity between your applications and connects both your applications that are in the cloud and your applications that are still on premises.

Oracle Integration Service provides native connectivity to Oracle software as a service (SaaS) applications. Oracle Integration Service adapters simplify connectivity by handling the underlying complexities of connecting to applications using industry-wide best practices. You only need to create a connection that provides minimal connectivity information for each system. Oracle Integration Service lookups map the different codes or terms used by the applications you are integrating to describe similar items (such as country or gender codes). Finally, the visual data mapper enables you to quickly create direct mappings between the trigger and invoke data structures. From the mapper, you can also access lookup tables and use standard XPath functions to map data between your applications.

After you integrate your applications and activate the integrations in the runtime environment, the dashboard displays information about the running integrations so you can monitor the status and processing statistics for each integration. The dashboard measures and tracks the performance of your transactions by capturing and reporting key information, such as throughput, the number of messages processed successfully, and the number of messages that failed processing. You can also manage business identifiers that track fields in messages and manage errors by integrations, connections, or specific integration instances.

About Process Environments in Oracle Integration Enterprise

Process automation is one of the features included in your Oracle Integration Enterprise subscription.

By using the Process Builder feature within Oracle Integration Enterprise, you can rapidly design, automate, and manage your business processes in the cloud.

There are two working environments in Process Builder: a design-time environment, where you can develop and test applications, and a runtime environment, where you use and monitor process applications.

About the Oracle Integration Process Design-Time Environment

The Oracle Integration Process design-time environment gives you access to common process application-related features.

When you click Process Builder in the Oracle Integration home page, you are taken to the Process Applications page, which is the Process design-time environment.

Using the Process design-time environment, you can:

• Create, manage, and share spaces
• Create applications (new or imported)
• Create or import decision models
• Create, share, and manage spaces
• Manage applications (by viewing, unlocking, cloning, downloading, and deleting)
• Manage decision models (by downloading and deleting)

Some of these functions are restricted by user role. For example, an owner can create a space and perform all the actions listed above, but a viewer can only view applications and isn’t allowed to make changes to them.

About the Oracle Integration Process Runtime Environment

You can use the Oracle Integration Process Runtime Environment to share documents and collaborate with others in your team, view complete tasks, delegate tasks, and reassign them. The runtime environment provides tools to track process flows, view detailed audit trails, troubleshoot, and fix processes.

When you click My Tasks in the Oracle Integration home page, the process runtime environment page opens. Here you can work on your tasks, use the navigation pane on the left to track process instances, view and work with dashboards, start an application, and perform administrative tasks.

In the Oracle Integration Process runtime environment, some tasks are available only to certain roles in the system. For example:

• An end user is able to start applications, work on tasks, or work on dynamic process instances.
• A developer, can create applications, build processes, and manage application lifecycles.
• An administrator can configure application settings, view dashboards, track application instances, and view alerts.