The Strategic Imperative For An Integrated Enterprise

Abstract

Most large organizations today have invested heavily in business software applications over the past few decades. These applications support key elements of sales, manufacturing, customer service, financial operations and have reaped tremendous rewards in productivity gains and competitive advantage. However, these individual applications were often not built or purchased with interoperability in mind. Rather, they evolved over time as a result of the latest technological innovation or hasty business need, leading to extremely complex, incompatible systems. As a result in many large organizations today the IT infrastructure often consists of many islands of automation, characterized by heterogeneous computing platforms, various proprietary information formats and diverse programming models. Against this backdrop competitive pressures are forcing large organizations to improve efficiency through integrating key business operations. E-commerce initiatives are also calling for a more integrated enterprise. This paper first examines the problem of poorly integrated business applications and the inadequacy of the traditional point-to-point integration approach. The paper then presents today’s enterprise application technology and discusses the advantages of enterprise application integration and e-commerce or B2B application integration.