Lecture 7 - e-Business Integration Flashcards
What can be the type of business that you want to integrate with for your e-Business solution?
- Trading Partners
- Suppliers
- Distributors
- Business Partners
What are 5 critical elements of e-Business Integration?
- Integrated business processes
- Information-exchange infrastructure
- Syntax and semantics
- Reliability
- Security
–> So basically, all the foundations for a multi-tiered architecture should be in place, with proper publish/subscribe messaging functionalities.
What is e-Business integration?
The coordination of the flow of information and processes among enterprises and their underlying system.
Typically combines automated services from multiple providers to support information exchange, transaction management, and coordination & collaboration across the extended value chain.
What are e-Business Integration objectives?
know well
- Integration of both processes and data
- Non-intrusive integration -> not altering the source and target systems
- Exploiting the re-use of existing apps and applications
- Functions in real-time with little end-user effort in the process
- Allow non-specialized end-users to easily use the integrated systems
- Exploiting common agreements between trading organizations
- Support/use of a uniform process and data model
- Exploiting advanced security standards
What is an absolute must in e-Business integration?
The use of standards to achieve cross-enterprise integration.
What is XML?
An excellent data transformation facility for standardizing message transformation between partners.
- > Can provide a standard for shared data and data definitions
- > Defining industry-wide standards
- > You can use XML in EDI
How can e-Business integration from an architectural point of view take place?
-> What is the topology?
It happens with a three-tier architecture that each organization has themselves.
The middle tier is the integration broker, which is placed between the databases and legacy systems on the right and the web-server on the left.
There is also a business process integration layer above the integration broker. This one is connected to the internet or another network, through which it connects to the business process integration layer of the other organization.
What is the purpose of the integration broker?
- It provides development tools and a run-time platform for the application development for the web.
- It holds the business logic
- It coordinates the sequence of complex integration steps.
What is the purpose of the business process integration layer?
It is a coordination layer that provides a non-invasive fit into the existing application server architectures.
What is BPM?
Business Process Management.
-> It adds conceptual innovations and technology from EAI and e-Business integration and re-implements all of it on the new e-Business infrastructure, based on web and XML standards.
What are three criteria that enable integration and synchronization of business processes?
- Integration with external workflows, components and applications.
- Provision of transaction management capabilities
- Management of a standard exchange vocabulary.
What are three business process integration patterns?
- Integrated Enterprise
- Brokered Enterprise
- Federated Enterprise
What are the characteristics of the integrated enterprise?
(Just like the bus / publish service concept:
- End-to-end business processes are managed and monitored in a complete fashion across and within all BU’s.
- BU’s are connected through an EAI bus system with integration brokering and workflow infrastructure
- Driven by management recognition
- Suitable for smaller companies or larger if common standard integration toolset is imposed
What is one advantage and one disadvantage of the integrated enterprise?
Ad: Provides enterprise-wide process management
Con: Requires implementing business process management across the entire organization
What are the characteristics of the brokered enterprise?
Just like the hub & spoke concept:
- End-to-end business processes are managed and monitored across all BU’s through a broker business unit to provide infrastructure and business process management.
- Driven by management recognition
- Supported by EAI integration brokering and workflow infrastructure
- Applicable for organizations where BU’s want to maintain their autonomy but benefit from a common messaging infrastructure
