ICT-Support for Enterprise Integration — Where Are We?

Globalisation of markets, enhancements in information and communication technology (ICT) and world-wide competition of companies have led to significant changes in the requirements of organisations for ICT-support. The need to enhance effectiveness and efficiency in enterprises and the need to be closer to the customers reanimates the topic of CIM in a broader sense. Companies are urged now to implement integrated but open solutions together with workflow support. This has to be closely coupled to what is called warehouse technology — the transparent access to distributed information. The resulting requirement is an integrated information and process support, based on heterogeneous distributed ICT-components. In this area a lot of effort has been made in the last decade on enterprise modelling and integration as a supporting technology for enterprise engineering. In this paper we try to give an overview about the status of ICT-support for enterprise integration (EI) with special focus on integrating architectures. Integrating architectures (or frameworks) describe software technologies to implement a development and execution platform for client/server applications, data and processes in distributed heterogeneous environments. Some thoughts about future research directions and exploitation actions will be presented as well.