Information system integration

Reviewer: Joan Catherine Horvath

This article is an introduction to a special CACM section on systems integration. Different types of integration are discussed and categorized for the interactions among the “business architecture” (organizational structure and workflow of a system's users); the “application architecture” (the way the business has its processes implemented and mapped into software); and the “technology architecture” (the information and communications infrastructure). Next, the author develops a set of overarching processes of integration that cut across all three categories. At the highest level, “interorganizational processes” require integration of (sometimes pre-existing) information systems across different functions. At the next layer down, enterprise applications (and, at a more detailed level still, middleware applications) wrestle with the integration of data, sometimes from legacy systems, and the difficulty of integrating new software systems with old ways of doing business. The article surveys technologies applicable to systems integration design, including lessons learned from parallel and distributed systems, database systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and multimedia systems. Finally, Hasselbring briefly introduces the other articles in this section.