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Integration Management View of InformationSystems in An Enterprise
Fu Xiang-lingSchool of Software EngineeringBeijing University of Posts andTelecommunicationsBeijing, ChinaFuxiangling@email.buptsse.cnSong Mao-qiangSchool of Software EngineeringBeijing University of Posts andTelecommunicationsBeijing, Chinasongmaoqiang@bupt.edu.cnYu Ya-nanSchool of Software EngineeringBeijing University of Posts andTelecommunicationsBeijing, ChinaYyn-110@163.comChen MianSchool of Software EngineeringBeijing University of Posts andTelecommunicationsBeijing, ChinaChenmian@email.buptsse.cn
 Abstract 
 — 
An integration management is a guideline in the processof informationization as improving the overall performance of informationization. Using grounded theory research, a framework of integration management in an enterprise has been proposed in this paper, which comprised of three layers, that is the integration of information systems, the integration of business process andorganization, and the integration of information services. The maincontent and key issues in each layer are elaborated from the general perspective and based on the status quo of informationization inChinese companies.
 Keywords-information system integration; information service;integration management 
 
I.
 
D
ILEMMAS IN
I
 NFORMATION
S
YSTEMS
I
MPLEMENTATION
  Nowadays IT/IS’s role in companies has shifted fromtraditional assisting tools to strategic enablers supportingenterprise strategies selection and even establishing enterprisestrategies [1]. Many companies have depended on IT/IS toimprove their overall operation and informationization has become a guarantee of survival and development of thesecompanies. In fact, behind the flourish of informationization,there were big dilemmas between idealities and realities, asdetailed in the following.
 A.
 
 IT Paradox and Productivity Paradox
The rapid innovation and development of IT and theunrestricted technological progress as described by the famousMoor's Law could not conceal the disappointment behind thelarge investments in IT which didn’t benefit companies asexpected. Many companies had the strong sense that their money had fall into an inexplicable black hole [2]. Thissituation has been called productivity paradox by economists.Paul A. Strassmann [3] stated that nobody could touch thatinvestments in IT had contributed his company to increase itsachievements. It was predicted that more and moreinvestments in IT would destine to an ostentatious soap bubbleof computer. Nicholas G. Carr [4], held that IT had been a daily-usedarticle and general IT could not anymore bring companiescompetitive advantages.
 B.
 
 Rich Data, Scarce Information
Wurman has called the perplexities caused by the abundantdisordered information as information anxiety, which hethought was an unbridged black hole between data andknowledge [5]. He pointed out that what allay the informationthirstiness would not be contents, but methods of discrimination, presentation and analysis of information. Withthe process of informationization, access to information is nolonger restricted, but this doesn’t mean equivalent convenienceto access essential information.
C.
 
 Italian Noodle Shaped Application Systems
At different stages of informationization, many companieshave built different application systems which linked and fedinterfaces to each other. We can represent the complexrelationship between this kind of systems as Fig. 1[6]. Andthese systems have been called by experts of IT as Italiannoodle shaped application systems, which have increased thestability risk of informationization, increased the difficultiesand complexities and therefore the costs of systemsmaintaining and finally formed an aversion to use andmaintain them. As a result, the performance of these systemsdeteriorated.
 D.
 
 Islands of Information
As described above, with the extensive applications of IT,various information systems such as ERP, PDM and CRMhave been introduced into many companies.Although each system had its own field and manageddifferent objects, there were business overlaps and evenrepeated information between these systems. However, eachsystem ran in its own orbit, ending in many “islands of automation” or “islands of information”, as illustrated by
 Fig.
Supported by Chinese Universities Scientific Fund
2010 Second International Conference on Information Technology and Computer Science
978-0-7695-4074-0/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEEDOI 10.1109/ITCS.2010.84317
 
1
, which is drawn by Hannus, a German professor. Though bridges could be set up between these islands, new islandswere formed constantly.
Figure 1
Italian noodle shaped application systemsFigure 2. Islands of automation in construction[6]
This kind of information islands prevented thesynchronization of information updating and automation of information delivering, cut off the association and data sharing between different systems, caused distrust and paradox between different departments, obstructed interpersonalcommunication over a company, and even impaired thecompany’s reputation by offering customers with inconsistentinformation and therefore increasing their perplexity. Even inthose companies whose information systems were in a highlevel, only operation layer (or task layer) was supported bymeaningful information while management layer (or tacticlayer) and strategic layer could rarely get necessaryinformation.How to solve these problems? On one hand, thecapabilities of IT should not be ignored. With the extensive penetration of IT into companies’ business and intensivecompetition, the demands of informationization becomes moreand more urgent, and the qualifications which companies putsto informationization seems higher and higher. The applicationof IT, whose success is vital to foster a company’s competence,covers many business areas. On the other hand, practicinginformationization in a certain company means efforts to allkinds of undertakings and should be taken as a systematicengineering.An emerging vision among researchers, consultants, and business analysts is that in the near future, corporateenvironments will connect people, places and things throughinformation services enabled by a heterogeneous set of networked technologies. In this vision, scalable,cost-effective information technology (IT) capabilities willneed to be provisioned as information services, delivered asinformation services, metered and managed as informationservices, and purchased as information services. From a pragmatic perspective, an information service is “the offeringof a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making availableinformation via technology” [7]. An information service makesmultiple, heterogeneous information sources discoverable andaccessible by breaking through traditional barriers of location,structure and context. This vision has built momentumduring the last decade propelled by the powerful integration of the IS, and then the integration management is becomingimportant.LegacySystem 2LegacySystem 3ApplicationSystem 3LegacySystem 1Application ApplicationSystem 1 System 2II
 
F
ROM SYSTEM INTEGRATION TO
S
ERVICE INTEGRATION
 From 1960s to 1970s, most IS and their applications weresimply designed to substitute repeated, separated manual work.When building these applications, people didn’t attach muchimportance to the integration of their company’s business processes and data.In 1980s, many companies were gradually aware of thesignificance and necessity of integration across the availableapplications, but it turned out a big challenge: technologicalemployees tried to redesign the existing applications in order to bind them into a synthesized one, but this kind of exertionresulted almost in no available.Being lacking of integration technologies, a lot of crucialinformation was enclosed into many self-governed systems intraditional companies and therefore left many repetitive andredundant tasks for each department as ever, reduced thecompanies’ performance and efficiency and thereforeincreased the running cost.One way to overcome the difficulties of informationsharing and consistency across different information systems isto abandon these existing systems and rebuild them into aunified management platform, on which every department’stasks can be executed. Undoubtedly, taking cost, implementing period and predictable and unpredictable difficulties intoaccount, this way should not be a favorable solution. Analternative way, which is more reasonable and feasible inconsideration of price, time and technology, is to replan all theapplication systems holistically, select an appropriate platform(a nervous information system ) and integrate all the islands of information onto this platform.The second way of enterprise application integration (EAI)is to integrate various software systems of differentdepartments in an organization. As for the formerly existingsoftware systems across which unblocked information cannot be transferred and shared freely, application integration caneffectively break the barriers between these systems and reach
318
 
its goal.Lately, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) andService-Oriented Architectures (SOA) [8] have gained a lot of momentum in software engineering. SOA and SOC are merelyextensions of the existing concepts and new technologies, likeXML Web Services, are being used to realize platformindependent distributed systems.To some extent, enterprise application integration can bridge the information islands, but considering the holisticimplementation of informationization, it alone is far fromadequate, for IT itself does not place any impediment in the process of informationization, while the innovations of organization and processes, the exploitation, utilization andservice of information resources does. From this point of view,we put forward that, as a systematic engineering, in the processof enterprise informationization, the concept of integrationmanagement should be followed through.As for integration, we think it is a creative course of elements fusing from the aspect of management and is aimedat hiking the value and capabilities of integrated system or gaining a synthesized new system with more powerfulfunctions by intentionally comparing, selecting and optimizingdifferent elements and orchestrating them into an organic unitin an optimal way.Underlain by the above explications, here we define theintegration management which is focused by this paper andshould be taken as a guideline in the process of informationization as improving the overall performance of informationization by the comprehensive integration attechnological, business and service levels during the process of  planning, implementation and application of enterpriseinformationization.III
 
A
RCHITECTURE OF INTEGRATION MANAGEMENT ININFORMATIONIZATION
 
 A.
 
The taxonomy of integration and the 3 layers of integration management in informationization
According to different requirements of different companies,integration should been imparted with different coverage andmeaning.In respect of its depth and intensiveness, integration hasevolved from earlier information integration to today’sapplication integration and will develop to future’s knowledgeintegration. Information integration emphasizes particularly oninformation and resource sharing over the entire enterprise inorder to deliver the right information to the right person (or machine) at the right minute in the right form. Besidesresource sharing, application integration also emphasizes oncollaboration between different applications by merging allkinds of isolated application systems into a collaborative oneusing integration softwares. Through application integration, acompany can easily coordinate its different functions andorganize its employees, resource, financing and applications.Knowledge integration is an effective approach to improve acompany’s management level and moreover raise itscompetitive capabilities by means of accumulation,organization, management, reusing, and sharing of theknowledge inside and outside.Regarding the scope, integration can be differentiated intoloose integration and comprehensive integration, breadthwaysintegration and lengthways integration, internal integrationwithin an enterprise and inter-integration across differententerprises, and so on.Based on the above classifications and the connotation of integration management explicated in section 2, this paper  propounds the architecture of integration management ininformationization, which is constituted by three essentiallayers, namely integration of information systems, integrationof business processes and organization structure, andintegration of service.Integration of information systems is the technologicallayer and the infrastructure of the overall integrationarchitecture, whose principal function is to integrate alldistributed, heterogeneous data sources or databases anddifferent application systems into a single platform in order toobtain the sharing and consistency of data and information.Objects integrated in this layer include all kinds of applicationsystems, such as ERP, PDM, and CRM. Integration of  business processes and organization structure is the businesslayer and the guarantee and support system of integrationmanagement, which should be executed all through the processof informationization to improve people’s interaction over acompany. The ultimate objective of both above two layers is toserve the enterprise more effectively. Hence, integration of information service is the uppermost and target layer of integration management which is to maximize the potential of informationization by providing integrated information,content and knowledge services. Fig. 3 describes therelationship between these three layers of integration.
Figure 3. The 3 layers of integration management
 In order to build an orchestrated information environment,each layer of integration management in informationizationshould be configured optimally to produce collaborative effectand it is not allowed for organizations to separate two kinds of  process automations, one is focused on application toapplication and another is focused on people to people. Byfusing these two kinds of automations, integrationmanagement can combine two most valuable assets of acompany, that is people centered knowledge managementsystems and programs centered application systems, to
Integration of ServiceIntegration of Information Systems
ApplicationsLegacies
Integration of Business Processesand Organization Structure
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