Introduction

Successful companies must continuously adapt to changing business conditions and requirements to defend their competitive advantages and to develop them for the future.

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A modern corporate information system (IS) strategy to support the required flexibility is indispensable. One way of reducing the increasing complexity of many products and value-added processes is modularization.

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A company concentrates on modules corresponding to its own core competencies,

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and establishes networks with partnering companies, who fill the remaining links in the value chain. Moreover, innovations of new information and communication technologies (ICT) not only accelerate the development of new products, value-added processes and value chains, but also support the management of these new organizational forms and business strategies. The integration of data, functions and processes is an essential step in the development towards a fully automated enterprise — which is considered as the long-term goal of IS research. I support the assumption of Scheer that the era of rigid monolithic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems has passed. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) might be a viable solution as an IS architecture approach in which both previously established and newly developed applications are encapsulated as services that can be flexibly integrated into a business process, even spanning company borders.