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Cluster: Enterprise Interoperability
For more information on the Enterprise Interoperability research roadmap, please click here.
Background
Increasingly, enterprises are cooperating with other enterprises. Not only large organisations set up cooperation agreements with other enterprises, but also SMEs are combining forces to compete jointly in the market. Nowadays, an enterprise’s competitiveness is largely determined by its ability to seamlessly interoperate with others.
However, legacy enterprise applications often hinder cooperation endeavours. These applications were in many cases not designed to interoperate with other applications. Some estimates claim that around 40% of system implementation budgets are spent on integration with other (legacy) systems within an enterprise. These integration issues are increased when interoperation across enterprises is considered.
The interoperability landscape of enterprise applications has a number of characteristics. Integrations are often point-to-point using proprietary APIs. For instance, although many legacy systems and packaged applications‘speak XML’, their data models and schemas are often quite different. The definition of common concepts such as an “order” or a “customer” may vary greatly among applications. Another obstacle is the lack of standards in a number of areas, for instance for describing and orchestrating business process flows across multiple systems.
Our current cluster profile is presented on this page.
You will find below a description of our research domain.
For more information on our current and future activities, see our 2007 work plan.
For more information on events, see our events page.
To see our results (both at project and cluster level), click here.
Scope
Enterprise interoperability has to be addressed at a number of levels. Interoperability should become a ‘design principle’ at multiple levels (from bottom to top):
- Physical integration
Naturally, physical integration is needed to facilitate co-operating applications and enterprises. - Syntactic application integration
Application integration, which affects the control of applications, is concerned with the usage of ICT to provide interoperation between enterprise resources. Cooperation between humans, machines and software programs has to be established by the supply of information through inter- and intra-system communication.
Application integration is split in two parts. Whereas semantic standards support integration at the level of ‘meaning’, syntactic standards are meant for integration at the level of ‘form’. Syntactic standards enable sources and messages to have similar formats. - Semantic application integration
This should result in a situation where the output of applications is meaningful to other applications. This type of integration abstracts from the technical details of software implementations. - Business process integration
When enterprises cooperate in a virtual enterprise or in a supply chain, they require a common understanding about shared business processes. Modelling languages are needed to make these business processes explicit. - Inter-enterprise coordination
The highest integration level is specific for situations in which enterprises cooperate with other enterprises and coordination is needed beyond their boundaries. This level concerns the coordination among enterprises. Dedicated guidelines for inter-enterprise coordination are needed, e.g. for partner selection, certification, inter-enterprise best practice definition, and so on.
The work in the Enterprise Interoperability cluster will focus on reference architectures, tools, methodologies, techniques, and infrastructures that support interoperability at the levels of application integration, business process integration, and (to some extent) inter-enterprise coordination.
The link with standardisation
The topics of ‘interoperability’ and ‘standardisation’ are closely linked. In order to solve interoperability issues, both standardisation and research activities are needed.
Organisations are increasingly required to participate in collaborations with other organisations. One of the requirements of these participants is the desire to have diverse local solutions that better suit their unique local conditions. Every enterprise, although willing to cooperate and interoperate with others in order to fulfil the common goals of the collaboration, insists on:
- preserving its rights to local choices and solutions (e.g. local models, mechanisms, and proprietary enterprise applications),
- protecting its proprietary information, which includes part of its information that it will not share, and
- provision of special access rights to a part of its information only to those other enterprises that either it can trust or it is obliged to provide information by contract.
This causes a tension between the obvious needs for cooperation among organisations (which would call for adoption of some common standards), and the suitability of certain proprietary solutions that can more readily meet local conditions. This tension is an important factor in interoperability. In other words, even if there are global standards sufficient for every business need, there will always be incompatible systems out there – either by choice or because of legacy.
The challenge for the ICT for Business domain is characterised by short time development, fragmented market with aggressive competitors. The traditional standardisation bodies have difficulties to cope with these three characteristics, and consequently a number of industrial “consortia” standards have been initiated. These industrial standards have to be recognised and their relationships with more traditional official bodies have to be revisited.
Cluster Publications
- Roadmap document which indicates what research challenges are to be addressed in future. The roadmap is now published. It is the result of a wide collaboration of experts in the field, lead by four editors, based on written contributions received and based on the results of the January 10 consultation workshop. The four editors are Dr. Ricardo Cabral (Universidade da Madeira), Prof. Guy Doumeingts (Adelior and Université Bordeaux I), Ms. Man-Sze Li (IC Focus), and Prof. Keith Popplewell (Coventry University).
All future contributions to the roadmap are welcome and encouraged as this roadmap is seen as an evolving document that should be constantly challenged and improved by all members (or related experts) of the Enterprise Interoperability community. All contributors will be duly acknowledged in future versions of the roadmap, which will remain a public document.
Please send your your written contributions to Cristina Martinez (cristina.martinez at ec.europa.eu) for forwarding to the editors.
NOTE: printed version of this roadmap document will be released soon. To obtain a copy of the publication, please send an email to Sylvie Woelffle (sylvie.woelffle at ec.europa.eu).