Integration Throughout And Beyond The Enterprise

Throughout the history of the IT industry, integration has been an important part of most projects. Whether it is integration of transactions, data, or processes, each has challenges and associated patterns and antipatterns. In an age of mobile devices, social networks, and cloud services, and big data analytics, integration is more important than ever, but the scope of the challenge for IT projects has changed. Partner APIs, social networks, physical sensors and devices, all of these and more are important sources of capability or insight. It is no longer sufficient to integrate resources under control of the enterprise, because many important resources are in the ecosystem beyond enterprise boundaries. With this as the basic tenet, we address these questions: What are the current integration patterns that help enterprises become and remain competitive? How do you choose when to use which pattern? What is the topology for a "composable business"? And how do you accelerate the process of implementation through intelligent choice of supporting integration middleware? This IBM® Redbooks® publication guides integration practitioners and architects in choosing integration patterns and technologies.

Enterprise solutions have emerged as promising tools for integrating and extending business processes across business functions. Supplying a clear and comprehensive introduction to the field, this book provides a detailed description of enterprise information integration-from the development of enterprise systems to extended enterprise information

Globalization, increased economic and geopolitical uncertainty, technological advancements, and a rise in the number of regulations and legislations have led to a significant rise in the importance, volume, and complexity of modern contractual agreements. Yet, in spite of these profound changes, many organizations still manage the contracting process in a fragmented, manual, and ad-hoc manner, resulting in poor contract visibility, ineffective monitoring and management of contract compliance, and inadequate analysis of contract performance. The net effect of this has been a heightened interest in re-engineering and automation of Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) processes across industry sectors and geographies. Enterprise Contract Management: A Practical Guide to Successfully Implementing an ECM Solution addresses all the questions surrounding ECM, ECM solutions, and the project management, change management, and risk management considerations to ensure its successful implementation. This concise text will help your organization manage the challenges of the contract life cycle and the key success factors and pitfalls in a typical ECM solution. It is a must read for corporate executives, buyers, procurement and strategic sourcing specialists, contract administrators and procurement managers. There is currently no other book available on ECM solutions. All existing books on contract management focus on the legal aspects of contracts, but none describe the functions, features, capabilities of technology solutions that support ECM, nor do they explain the key considerations for ensuring a successful ECM solution implementation.

In order to remain competitive in today's world, companies need to be able to integrate internally and externally by connecting sensors, customers and partners with the information in their systems of record. In short, they need to integrate with everything. This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes how IBM Application Integration Suite and IBM Messaging portfolio can be used to satisfy the needs of core hybrid integration use cases, accelerating companies in their digital transformation journey. All concepts are explained within the context of these use cases: Joining the API economy Improving productivity Refactoring for innovation The target audience for this book is cloud and integration architects and specialists who are implementing hybrid integration solutions.

To achieve success in today's business climate you must do more than provide high quality low cost products to customers when and how they want them. Customers and suppliers require fully integrated information - throughout the supply chain or value chain. You must integrate your organization so completely that executive decisions are implemented effortlessly. Competitive pressures often cause a reduction in prices, in spite of continually rising costs. A decrease in prices paired with increased costs quickly eliminates any profitability and threatens your company's ability to survive. This book shows you how you can reduce costs through the elimination of waste caused by poor communication and coordination throughout a company as well as between the company, its suppliers, and its customers. The author explains Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in non-technical terms, describing how an ERP system can fully integrate all functions in your manufacturing organization. He demonstrates the system's capability to increase efficiency and profitability - and to delight the customer - as well as its current deficiencies. In addition to his thorough coverage of ERP, the author introduces Total Enterprise Integration (TEI), the process of integrating all the information required to fully support a manufacturing company. TEI represents a logical extension of complete information integration throughout a manufacturing enterprise and into the supply chain. This new concept shows you how the intelligent use of work flow allows responsibility to go to the most appropriate front-line decision makers while maintaining proper budgetary and operational controls. The power of TEI is in the integration of communication across the entire manufacturing company, and out through the supply chain to customers and suppliers. Enterprise Resource Planning and Beyond: Integrating Your Entire Organization focuses on what a fully integrated system can do for you. Features

Based on consultations with more than 80 experts, policy makers and stakeholders from 10 European countries, this manual explains the rationale behind legal frameworks for social enterprises, identifies the critical factors for legal framework design and recommends actions to ensure legislation fully meets the needs of social enterprises. It lays out the fundamental steps related to the life cycle of legal frameworks and provides options that policy makers can use in the design and implementation process.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration. The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.

"This book provides a detailed analysis of the important strategies for integrating IT systems into fields such as e-business and customer-relationship management. It supplies readers with a comprehensive survey of existing enterprise architecture and integration approaches, and presents case studies that illustrate best practices, describing innovative methods, tools, and architectures with which organizations can systematically achieve enterprise integration"--Provided by publisher.