Subject: Workshop on ENTERPRISE-INTEGRATION APPLICATIONS
ICEIMT'97 Objectives: The purpose of the ICEIMT was to develop an international pre-normative consensus among both suppliers and users on a synthesized set of technical issues sufficient to provide a common context for the discussion and comparison of EI technology alternatives. Further, we tried to enumerate the various approaches and characterize them so as to reach consensus on where they overlap, complement, and conflict. Where they conflict, we tried to develop approaches for resolution, potentially leading to collaborative research demonstrations. The workshop reports identify problems and gaps in the current technologies that point to new research. Where applicable the reports refer to relevant standardization efforts aiming on a coherent set of standards supporting enterprise integration.
Workshop 3 Objectives: ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION APPLICATIONS
Workshop 3 Themes:
Assess the contributions to EI by the many application areas currently promoted. This includes definition of the problems, challenges, barriers, and strategies that exist to resolve them.
Related Themes:
Workshop 3 Format:
June 11: Familiarization--Participants presentations, Development of Expectations
June 12: Direction--Open brainstorming on Alternatives (Workgroups)
June 13: Commitment--Consolidate Workgroup Results, Formulate and adopt plans of action.
Workshop 3 Reports:
Abstract. The subject of migration and subsequent integration of existing (heritage) applications has been overlooked by the enterprise integration community. The working group calls for the definition of an Application Integration Architecture, in the sense of a semantically uniform platform encompassing: models of services, migration constructs such as interfaces or wrappers, schema sharing (by services or by users) and model mapping facilities. Besides the basic features of this architecture, aspects of a stepwise method guiding its deployment are also considered.
Data processing in most enterprises today is made by software applications which are characterised by indispensability and heterogeneity. The former is due to the usually prohibitive financial and operational cost associated with rewriting an existing application and the latter to the multi-vendor environments and products coexisting within the enterprise. Both factors contribute to insufficient information transfer among those applications and, consequently, to a low degree of integration of the enterprise. It is therefore apparent that full scale integration of such heritage-bound enterprises is preconditioned by integration at the application level (application integration) and this, in turn, by migration of existing applications into the newly proposed integrated environments.
The working group identified that poor or no attention has been paid to these areas, resulting in an almost complete absence of any Application Integration Architecture able to lead to a migration path as a necessary step towards business integration. For example, access to information originating at a source application (server) and required at a sink application (client) is a frequently encountered need. In most cases, however, no public interface exists, meaning that information must be captured either through a device-specific interface, or not at all.
The problem becomes paramount when the business requirements point to the deployment of the concept of virtual enterprise, where the time constraints associated with the setting of such enterprises require fast and unambiguous inter-operation of various relevant models as well as applications.
Proposal
Application integration has not been given the consideration it deserves within the enterprise-integration bibliography and practice, especially when heritage applications are concerned. In this paper, we presented the topics that appear to be the most prominent in the area, under a semantically uniform framework. Further work can be classified within the following context:
Abstract
This is a report of breakout sessions from Workshop 3, Workgroup 2 and Workgroup 3. The two groups combined on the second day. Recommendations which emerged were sufficiently strong that the group decided to present them in the form of a skeletal description of a project to address the nature of standards for enterprise integration that better address the virtual enterprise case of distributed control.
Enterprise integration (EI) is difficult; collectively, we are not making the progress that was even recently anticipated and as a result, our economies are saddled with less productive, less agile and less innovative businesses than we know can be achieved. It is clear that barriers to more effective EI will succumb to solutions that integrate notions of distributed control, but how to introduce indeterminate elements to tools which optimize at the system level is not addressable under current notions of enterprise integration.
We propose a structured basic rethinking of the problem to be used to guide investments in research, products and standards. The beneficiaries will be institutions and users who have been plagued by poor results from standards and EI research, as well as tool and method suppliers who will support the market as it becomes better understood.
Proposal
The manufacturing enterprise is more difficult to integrate because there are so many different types of elements being integrated, decompositions among overlapping and often contrary breakdowns. A focus of the work is to understand these parallel decompositions with an understanding that they result from different enterprise dynamics. Those different dynamics define the several issues of the research.
The proposed project's approach is a balance of both advanced, very basic research and incremental tests and demonstrations. The idea is to foster radical new perspectives and foundations, but simultaneously insist on a testable evolutionary implementation strategy.
EI research in the past has focused on solving easier issues first. But we seem to not be making progress on the larger, harder issues. Because this effort does so, it should be international in scope and involve the best experts the world has.
The research component of the proposal is predicated on the idea not of inventing new science, but of leveraging existing science in other domains to address the needs noted above. The research should understand how the application of each formal insight, tool or technology differs from its original domain to the presumably more difficult EI domain.
The research component aspires to giant steps. But the development component expects to package results in increments for evolutionary progress. The product of the development component will be solutions implemented in pilots, prototypes, tests, shadows, and pathfinders. Details of this component will depend on the performers. But it is expected that some real virtual enterprises will be employed as test beds for new methods and tools indicated by the research component.
Return to: ICEIMT'97 home page.
Edited by: JG Nell, NIST. Updated 1997-September-25.
Send message to: nell@nist.gov, or kosanke@ipa.fhg.de, or both.