EAI

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an approach to improve system interoperability in a business process oriented fashion. The described empirical research study examines the impact of the general organizational understanding, the manner of implementation and deployment of EAI projects on the enterprise architecture. The article illustrates the results and introduces some advice how to improve the recognized issues of the EAI situation in real life context.

Today’s economic situation can be characterized by increasingly changing demands from the markets to the companies leading to shorter product life-cycles in conjunction with cost-reductions. One of the strategical reactions of the companies is to enforce mutual collaboration. Hence collaborative business processes are the basis to establish such a collaboration on the process layer. The integraton of theses processes nearly in real-time is one today’s peculiar challenges. In the following a concept is described, that enables the dynamic interconnection of collaborative business-processes based upon a knowledge-based EAI.

The target of complex IT-projects is the improvement of flexibility and sustainability of organisational architectures. The main topic of the article is the definition and implementation of modules of organisational and IT-structures to increase flexibility. Approaches found in the area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) fit the described paradigm and support the technical implementation.

Speed and cost reduction are plainly the factors of success in global competition. But more and more, the increasing amount of information aggravates the efficient access and finding of information from different systems. Semantic technologies provide convincing solutions by integration of process related knowledge models. Field-tested applications from areas like information retrieval, product development and online consulting illustrate further areas of application.