Intra Enterprise Integration: Methods and Direction

Chapter Summary 1. Corporations grow, and as they grow the need for integration across the enterprise increases. Integration can be accomplished through various means. 2. Consistent with the theme of this book, the need for alignment – integration is really a business need, and the technology mechanisms won't help without the proper organizational structures, goals, and incentives. Both organizational and technological integration is necessary. 3. Business processes are the vital link between the technical and organizational infrastructures of the organization. Processes are also the mechanism through which most inter-organizational interaction 372 takes place and are therefore the foundation for increasingly electronic forms of commerce. 4. Enterprise integration doesn't happen naturally. It needs to be planned. Yet the planning cannot be precise, as business processes and facilitating technologies will change, creating different needs and different potential solutions. 5. New mechanisms for integration can be utilized to create a flexible, loosely coupled framework, within which special integration needs can be quickly fulfilled. These new technical mechanisms depend on standards that work both inside and outside the enterprise. Introduction This chapter focuses on enterprise integration at two levels – the systems level and the organizational level. Integration at the systems level requires common standards and data definitions, and some means of synchronizing the communication between different software applications. This is usually what is meant by the recently coined term Enterprise Application Integration. However, as pointed out by Markus and others [Markus], systems integration in the software system sense is not, in itself, sufficient to ensure organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Organizations consist of individuals, departments, divisions and functions, which must also be integrated for the organization to be successful. Both integration and coordination have been discussed in the 373 management literature going back to the 1930s [Gulick], and their definitions have changed over time. Today, coordination is the more general term, referring to people-oriented as well as systems-oriented dependencies. Integration is most often used in discussing the linkages between software systems. This chapter uses the two terms interchangeably when talking about the organizational aspects of integration. This chapter will not focus on a third level of integration, cross-enterprise integration and coordination, since this is the topic of the next chapter in this book. However, any discussion of enterprise integration must recognize that external needs, for example, customer requirements or supply chain efficiency, are increasingly important determinants of organizational effectiveness. Various points in the chapter …