Enterprise Integration

Enterprise Integration (EI) is the re-engineering of business processes and information systems to improve teamwork and co-ordination across organizational boundaries, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the enterprise as a whole. Starting from the needs for EI, and some identification of the state of the art, the paper tries to define a base for building consensus on the research issues. Various models and infrastructure are presented to complement the need for EI requirements in Information Technologies (IT). The needs for acceptance and awareness on enterprise integration in the user community are then presented. Only if the user community is convinced of the benefits of enterprise integration will the IT vendors invest in such a market and will the efforts bear fruit. The vision for enterprise integration has to be a tool for the enterprise operation supporting day-to-day decision making across the entire operation from customer order acceptance and asset management to customer support. It must be a tool, which will link decision-makers on all organizational levels to relevant and real time information across organizational boundaries. This tool will enable new paradigms like extended and virtual enterprises to become a reality on a broad scale and with fast turn-around times and which, in the long run, will support operation control and monitoring.