Editor. M. Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart
The CIMOSA - News is published by the CIMOSA Association. The CIMOSA News will report on CIMOSA applications, evolution of its technical specification, advancements in standardisation and related items. Contributions from other parties are welcome. The CIMOSA - News will be printed periodically and is also available in the internet at the dedicated WWW server http://cimosa.cnt.pl/News/
OBJECTIVES:
The project has organised a series of ICEIMT Work-shops with the following themes:
In order to accumulate expert knowledge and to reach common results, the workshops have been structured along a general agenda: Following expert presentations, working groups have identified issues and made recom-mendations for further work or proposals for projects.
At the ICEIMT'97 Conference in Turin on October 28-30, invited papers and the results of the working groups will be presented, including proposals for projects re-lated to enterprise integration. These proposals will be discussed in a special session. The conference proceed-ings will be printed by Springer-Verlag and will be available at the conference.
Workshop 2 'Enterprise Metrics and Standardisa-tion Policies' has addressed enterprise integration met-rics and policies of standardisation for EI. Explicit rela-tions between the two subjects could very much enhance the industry involvement on standardisation. Looking at the proposal of TC184/SC5/WG1 for a hierarchical set of standards to address enterprise integration, it was recognised that the human centred approach is nearly missing in the present discussion. The role of standardi-sation in strategic enterprise management and the rela-tions with 'enterprise horizontal' standards like ISO 9000 or ISO 14000 have been discussed. The discussion revealed a clear need for standards for enterprise inte-gration to be categorised in a class of 'enterprise hori-zontal' standards.
An Enterprise Integration Capability Model has been proposed, to capture the integration potentials of an enterprise classified in levels of integration. A system-atic modelling method has been identified to assess the potential contributions of EI in three categories: process, human and technology and in a generic process of five steps. The model allows to analyse capabilities, assess appropriateness, plan and implement changes and to capture the integration benefits,. Note that the level of integration of an enterprise depends on its business goals; e.g. it may be limited by cost constraints.
Workshop 3 'Enterprise Integration Applications' has investigated the requirements for migration of ex-isting applications towards enterprise integration, espe-cially if the concept of virtual enterprises is to be ex-ploited. One problem of integration is the insufficient information transfer between IT applications in hetero-geneous systems. A generic migration methodology has been proposed which is built on either the use of wrap-pers for application interfaces (API) or application sharing for information sharing of the results. Categori-sation of applications and of functionalities into applica-tion dependent and independent ones has been proposed as a measure to improve migration efficiency.
Managing distributed control in the enterprise is one prerequisite to achieve a higher level of application integration. However, there is a distinct difference be-tween distributed systems and distributed enterprise control. Enterprises contain humans and artefacts, rather than artefacts only. The role of humans in distributed control will mainly define the behaviour of distributed enterprises. Research required in this area should rely on social, communication and co-ordination oriented sci-ence, and biological systems theory.
Workshop 4 'EI principles and fundamentals' has addressed issues of the underlying semantics and on-tologies in business process representation and enter-prise modelling languages. Knowledge and common understanding of material and information flow is well developed and modelling language constructs have been defined in the ENV 12204 pre standard. Modelling the roles and relations of clients and suppliers - human or agent based communication flow in enterprises - need a common semantic definition and additional modelling constructs.
Common understanding of models could be achieved through a unified enterprise modelling language (UEML). A language which would translate the mean-ing into an unambiguous representation through the use of ontologies and micro theories. Associated libraries would enable the use of special dialects for different users of enterprise models.
Workshop 5 'Enterprise Integration Users and Ven-dors' started form the matrix of enterprise integration capabilities developed in Workshop 2 and the two as-pects of matrix type organisation - function and process oriented. Different types of relations between the players in enterprise processes could be identified: Common goal and value sharing, negotiations between players, establishment of trust and contracts , information shar-ing and exchange. These relations depend on the players involved and especially in extended/virtual enterprises have to encompass players from different organisations. The term 'teaming' has been selected for the process of establishing these relations between players in enterprise processes. The relations could be defined in the form of frameworks capturing the details of particular relations in order to allow their support by special services, IT or non-IT based. Middle-ware services are needed with capabilities of interfacing, communication or co-operation, supporting the players in business processes and supporting their tasks of by providing the links be-tween players and processes.
'CIMOSA - a primer on key concepts, purpose and busi-ness value', provides an overview on enterprise model-ling, applications and business benefits.
The CIMOSA Association is involved in promotion of CIMOSA, its active support in national, European and international standardisation and in consolidation of the evolution of its technical specifications. Members of the CIMOSA Association are industrial and research organisations involved in exploitation of CIMOSA or interested in the subject of enterprise integration (EI).
www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 31.07.1997 (last update: 31.07.1997)