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ICEIMT'97
International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modeling Technology--1997

Enterprise Integration Overview

Enterprise integration has been discussed since the early days of computers in industry and especially in the manufacturing industry with CIM as the acronym for operations integration. In spite of the different understandings of the scope of integration in CIM it has always stood for information integration across at least parts of the enterprise. Information integration essentially consists of providing the right information, at the right place, at the right time.

With this understanding the different needs in enterprise integration can be identified:

1. Identify the right information: requires a precise knowledge of the information needed and created by the different activities in the enterprise operation. Knowledge which has to be structured in the form of an accurate model of the enterprise operation. A model which describes product and administrative information, resources and organisational aspects of the operational processes and allows what-if analysis in order to optimize these processes.
2. Provide the right information at the right place: requires information sharing systems and integration platforms capable of handling information transaction across heterogeneous environments. Environments which consists of heterogeneous hardware, different operating systems and monolithic software applications (legacy systems). Environments which cross organizational boundaries and link the operation of different organisations on a temporal basis and with short set-up times and limited time horizon (extended and virtual enterprises).
3. Up-date the information in real time to reflect the actual state of the enterprise operation: requires not only the up-date of the operational data (information created during the operation), but adapting to environmental changes as well. Changes which may originate from new customer demands, new technology, new legislation or new philosophies of the society at large. Changes which may require modification of the operational processes, the human organization or even the overall scope and goals of the enterprise.
4. Co-ordinate business processes: requires precise modelling of the enterprise operation in terms of business processes, their relations with each other, with information, resources and organisation. This goes far beyond exchange of information and information sharing. It takes into account decisional capabilities and know-how within the enterprise for real time decision support and evaluation of operational alternatives.
5. Organize and adapt the enterprise: requires very detailed and up-to-date knowledge of both the current state of the enterprise operation and its environment (market, technology, society). Knowledge which has to be available a priori and very well structured to allow easy identification of and access to relevant information.

The state of the art in enterprise engineering and integration is rather confusing. On one hand it claims to provide solutions for many of the issues identified in enterprise integration. On the other hand the solutions seem to compete with each other, use conflicting terminology and do not provide any clues on their relations to solutions on other issues. Workflow modelling, business-process modelling, business-process re-engineering (BPR), and concurrent engineering all aim toward identifying and providing the information needed in the enterprise operation. In addition, numerous integrating-platforms concepts are promoted with only marginal or no recognition or support of information identification. Tools claiming to support enterprise modelling exist in very large numbers, but the support is rather marginal, especially if models are to be used by the end user, for instance, in decision support.

The understanding and application of enterprise-engineering and enterprise-integration technologies especially in the end-user community is hampered by the current confusion in solutions and terminology as well as by the lack of sufficient enterprise-integration technologies and their insufficient business justification. The need for enterprise-engineering and enterprise-integration technology is intensifying through the increasing emphasis on agile operation in globally extended or virtual enterprises.

Objectives of the ICEIMT initiative: Improve international consensus on issues in enterprise engineering and integration technologies. The ICEIMT initiative will identify barriers, propose solutions, communicate results, and help to justify the technology to industry so that it can be moved profitably from the international R&D community to broadly based implementations.

Method for International Consensus on Enterprise Engineering and Enterprise Integration: identify the major issues, organise a series of workshops with international experts and try to resolve or at least reduce these issues. The GERAM framework as proposed by the IFAC/IFIP Task Force will be used for harmonising the different concepts and terminology. Results from the workshops will be presented in the concluding conference (ICEIMT'97). Conference proceedings, publications of additional papers and specific workshops will be provided for information dissemination.