IT

IT Infrastructure

IT Infrastructure

In this complex and dynamic environment, homogenous IS architectures are no longer practical options. Many organisations are changing their strategies from a single sourcing or traditional point-to-point integration strategy to a more proactive approach of building and evolving a standardised integration architecture capability that enables fast assembly and dis-assembly of business processes and corresponding business software components.

This will include a description of the solution and an evaluation of the major benefits. From this project, important lessons and critical success factors emerged which will be presented. Finally, offers some conclusions for managing an integration architecture.

Analysis of intergration approaches

Focus of existing approaches

Integrating information systems means establishing communication between these systems. Österle (1996) differentiates between three types of applications to be addressed by integration:

1. Homogeneous with one instance. One process is supported by one application and one data base. This model avoids the problems emerging from redundant data storage and asynchronous data exchange between separated applications.

2. Homogeneous with several instances. Several identical processes in different business units are supported by several identical applications that run on different computers and rely on logically separated data bases. An example for that kind of integration is the Application Link Enabling (ALE) from SAP, which provides a mechanism for the coordination of master and transactional data in physically distributed SAP environments.

3. Heterogeneous. Several different processes in different business units are supported by several different applications. An additional problem compared to the integration in a homogeneous environment is that the concerned applications are built upon divergent data models, which means that they provide different semantics of the data to be exchanged.

Therefore, the following will only focus on inter-process integration, i.e. the direct coupling of applications. A prominent example for inter-process communication is EDI. Information is not only transmitted electronically but also processed automatically to the receiving IS.

Inter-process integration requires that all aspects of the communication are identical between both systems. As Kubicek showed, the ISO/OSI-model has to be extended to include all necessary aspects (Kubicek, 1992; Themistocleous and Irani, 2001). In addition to the communication services which are still covered by ISO/OSI, another three layers are required which mainly stem from communication theory.

In the first place, a common syntax is required which defines the order, length and the type of data being exchanged. But the definition of a common syntax is not sufficient for an automated integration of systems. In addition, semantic is needed to assign real world subjects and notions to the transmitted characters. Semantics add a certain meaning to individual data fields (e.g. the data field “price” is more accurately specified by the filed “currency” and an automated interpretation of the content, like “CHF” as “Swiss Francs”, is enabled).

An analysis of current research approaches shows that they lack in two dimensions. First, most of them have an intra-organisational integration scope. Only a few approaches consider inter-organisational integration as their focus. Second, nearly all approaches encompass only one or two integration objects concerning data, object and process ...