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International Conference on Enterprise Integration

and Modelling Technology, ICEIMT’97

The ICEIMT’97 Conference was a part of the major event of the Enterprise Integration--International Consensus (EI-IC) initiative, jointly supported by the European Commission through ESPRIT Project 21.859, and by the United States through the DOC/NIST Manufacturing Enterprise Integration project. The initiative is sponsored by Fiat and both the IFAC and IFIP organisations. 100 experts in the fields of engineering, business administration, and computer science attended the conference. The majority was from academia, coming from 21 countries and all six continents.

The goal of the ICEIMT'97 is to improve international consensus on issues in enterprise engineering, modelling, and integration technologies. The conference identified barriers, proposed solutions, and communicated results, thereby helping to justify the technology to industry so that key technology can be moved profitably from the international R&D domain to broadly based implementation.]

The ICEIMT’97 Conference was organised on the base of invited papers that present many different views on enterprise integration. The conference began with position papers on standardisation from both Europe and the USA. The different players in the field, academia, IT users and vendors, presented views on the current state of enterprise integration, future needs and developments, and basic principles of enterprise engineering and integration. Selected papers from major European (ESPRIT), USA, and international (IMS) initiatives provided details on ongoing work in this area.

There was special emphasis on the results from the five ICEIMT workshops that preceded the conference. Following are highlights from the workshops:

• Integration-improvement efforts must consider and address human aspects in addition to technical aspects (processes and technologies) of the enterprise operation. Human aspects like skill, trust, learning, communication, and team organisation play an increasingly important role in enterprise integration.
• New concepts were proposed to model processes and organisations in networks of enterprises.
• The business benefits of enterprise integration have to be identified and communicated. Several formats were proposed to help illustrate the degree of integration of business processes, operational systems and technologies. Metrics are needed to measure these.
• The IFAC/IFIP-developed enterprise engineering and integration framework, GERAM (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodologies), was used to harmonise the many efforts in research and development.
• A global integrating infrastructure is needed that is as pervasive as Internet but much more powerful.

At the conference several areas of work to be done were identified:

• Maintenance of current ICT installations with their legacy in old applications represent a significant barrier for improved technical integration. Migration of these systems is seen as a very important subject for both research and standardisation.
• Many research opportunities arise from conflicting solutions and lack of a common base and terminology.
• Standardisation is considered very important and necessary to push EI forward, but industry is hesitant to support the effort. Industry is recognising the need for strategic standardisation policies in the information-technology domain.
• One predominant issue identified in the promotion and implementation of EI in industry is how to convince management and decision makers to invest in enterprise-level integration. Vendors must provide better, more integrated, applications to support EI users. Users must find metrics to justify their investments in enterprise integration.

From a technical viewpoint, integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) looks feasible today: Highly integrated prototypes and commercial solutions with limited integration capability through middleware, componentware and integration protocols are available. Research in ICT is moving in the direction of more interoperability of components and distributed control.

The workshops produced a number of proposals for R&D projects. These proposals were discussed privately, off-line, in a special conference session designed to be the starting point for research projects on national, European, or international level.

The conference was accompanied by a demonstration of advanced modelling and simulation tools, which support enterprise integration.

The ICEIMT initiative will hold three further workshops. The first workshop, linked to the European IT Conference, will take place on 1997-November-27, in Brussels, with the goal to further consolidate the EI consensus, to elaborate awareness and acceptance in industry and to pursue the proposals for projects. Additional workshops in 1998 with emphasis on information dissemination will try to involve industry by demonstrating results from applications, modelling tools and standardisation.

The conference proceedings volume, printed by Springer-Verlag (ISBN 3-540-63402-9) with about 70 papers, provides a very comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art in of enterprise integration.

For more information please contact:

Martin Zelm, CIMOSA Association, E-mail: ko@ipa.fhg.de

or

Jim Nell, NIST, E-mail: nell@nist.gov

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