International Conference on Enterprise Integration
and Modelling Technology, ICEIMT'97
October 28-30, 1997 in Turin, Italy
The ICEIMT'97 Conference has been part of the major event of the 'Enterprise
Integration - International Consensus' (EI-IC) initiative, jointly supported
by the European Commission through ESPRIT Project 21.859 and by the United
States through DOC/NIST- Manufacturing Enterprise Integration, a NIST
project. The initiative is sponsored by FIAT and both the IFAC and IFIP
organisations. The conference was attended by 100 experts in the fields of
engineering, business administration and computer science , the majority from
academia, coming from all five continents.
With the goal to improve consensus on enterprise integration the conference
aimed to identify barriers, propose solutions, communicate results, and help
to justify the technology to industry so that it can be moved profitably from
the international R&D community to broadly based implementation.
The ICEIMT'97 Conference was organised on the base of invited papers only
which present the many different views on enterprise integration. Starting
within position papers on standardisation from both Europe and the USA, the
different players in the field - academia, IT users and vendors - presented
their different view on the current state of enterprise integration, future
needs and developments. Basic principles of enterprise engineering and
integration and selected papers from European (ESPRIT) , USA and
international (IMS) initiatives provided details on ongoing work in this
area.
Special emphasis was placed on the presentation of the results from the five
ICEIMT workshops which preceded the conference. The following are highlights
from the different workshops:
- Enterprise Integration has to consider and address human aspects in
addition to technical aspects (processes and technologies) of the enterprise
operation. Human aspects like skill, trust, learning, communication and team
organisation play an increasingly important role in enterprise integration.
New concepts have been proposed to model processes and organisations in
networks of enterprises.
- The business benefits of Enterprise Integration have to be captured and
evaluated. Several grids have been proposed to which allow to apply metrics
for the degree of integration of business processes, operational systems and
technologies.
- The IFAC/IFIP developed enterprise engineering and integration framework
GERAM (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodologies) has
been used to harmonise the many efforts in research and development.
At the conference several areas of work to be done have been identified:
- Maintenance of current ICT installations with their legacy in old
applications represent a significant barrier for improved technical
integration. Migration of these systems is seen as a very important subject
for both research and standardisation.
- Research issues also arise from conflicting solutions and lack of a common
base and terminology. Standardisation is considered very important and
necessary to push EI forward, but industry is hesitant to support the effort.
- One predominant issue identified in the promotion and implementation of EI
in industry is how to convince management and decision makers to invest in
enterprise-level integration. Vendors are still waiting to provide better,
more integrated, applications to support EI users. Users are still looking
for metrics of enterprise integration to justify their investments, and they
are recognising the need for strategic standardisation policies in the
information-technology domain
From a technical viewpoint, integration of information and communication
technologies (ICT) looks feasible today: Highly-integrated prototypes and
commercial solutions with limited integration capability through middleware,
componentware and integration protocols are available. Research in ICT is
moving in the direction of more interoperability of components and
distributed control.
The workshops have produced a number of proposals for R&D projects. These
proposals have been discussed individually in a special conference session to
become the starting point for research projects on national, European or
international level.
Furthermore, the conference was accompanied by a demonstration of advanced
modelling and simulation tools, which support enterprise integration.
The ICEIMT initiative will hold three further workshops. The first workshop,
linked to the European IT Conference, will take place on November 27, 1997 in
Brussels with the goal to further consolidate the EI consensus, to elaborate
awareness and acceptance in industry and to pursue the proposals for
projects. Additional workshops in 1998 with emphasis on information
dissemination will try to involve industry by demonstrating results from
applications, modelling tools and standardisation.
The conference proceedings printed by Springer-Verlag (ISBN 3-540-63402-9)
with about 70 papers provide a very comprehensive overview on the
state-of-the-art in of enterprise integration.
For more information please contact:
Martin Zelm
eMail : ko@ipa.fhg.de
www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 7.12.1997 (last update: 7.12.1997)