Seminar: Trends in Enterprise Interoperability - Enterprise Architecture

58313107
3
Networking and Services
Advanced studies
Year Semester Date Period Language In charge
2013 spring 14.01-26.04. 3-4 English Lea Kutvonen

Lectures

Time Room Lecturer Date
Tue 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 15.01.2013-19.02.2013
Tue 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 12.03.2013-23.04.2013

NOTE: This seminar starts a week later than announced, that is, the first session is on Tue 22.1. 2013. The actual schedule will be agreed and published in more detail in the seminar website.

Information for international students

 

 

The seminar materials, instructions and detailed schedules are available

Requirements:

  • paper of 6-8 pages in IEEE format (IEEE guidelines for the paper (Latex and Word) can be found from the IEEE Transaction author guide:http://www.ieee.org/pubs/authors.html)
  • peer review
  • "conference style" presentation with slides (40 min slot with each,split to approximately 20-25 min talk, 5 mins for discussion, 5 mins for anonymous feedback slips gathering, 5 min break for setting up the next presentation)

General

 

What is enterprise interoperability?

 
Enterprise interoperability denotes the capability of enterprises (e.g., companies, organisations from public sector, independent units within organisations) to govern mutual activities with the help of their independent computing systems. 
 
Obstacles for enterprise interoperability can arise from conceptual and technological domains, but also from the organisational domain. Examples of conceptual barriers include mismatches on the essential concepts on the business area, like one security-service producer considering security to include physical security measures only, while the client acts on software licencing where software tools would be more relevant. Examples of technological barriers include mismatches in computing platforms and their communciation. Finally, organisational barriers arise in the mismatches on expected responsibility and authority structures used in partner enterprises, causing mismatches on decision-making and approval processes involving all partner enterprises.
 
Therefore, enterprise interoperability is addressed by multidiciplinary research: social, organisational, economical, business sciences; computer science and software engineering; and modeling of organisations, software and systems. Research methods involved also vary depending on the aspect under study, but due to the nature of the field, should always combine the user requirements (enterprise, people, interoperation from enterprise to another) with the aligned  computing solutions.
 

What is enterprise computing?

 
Research on enterprise computing involves aspects of creating, managing and supporting intra- and inter-enterprise distributed application systems, i.e. systems involving processes, people and technology. Aspects of interest include engineering technologies and methods, enterprise application development and management, enterprise architectures, distributed computing platforms, enterprise computing systems, integration and interoperability of solutions, service-oriented architectures and business process management.
 
In comparison to enterprise interoperability, the scope of enterprise computing is more focused on the distributed computing domain, with the research methodologies arising from computer science, architecture development, and software engineering. It should however be remembered that enterprise interoperability requires a suitable enterprise computing environment.
 

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise architecture is a structure that considers the enterprise's business needs, information resources, computing solutions and processing capabilities as a whole, where each element has a precise role and is connected to other elements. Before we can improve enterprise interoperability in general or build specific utilities, we must understand a lot more in depth what constitutes as an Enterprise architecture. That vision will help us understanding Ecosystem architecture as well.

 

What are the current trends in enterprise interoperability?

 
At present, the main theme in enterprise interoperability is to create a utility-like capability for enterprises to support their business activities. The business should at the same time move towards knowledge-oriented collaborations and semantic interoperability.
 
Elements of the enterprise interoperability utilities needed  include in practice
  • service discovery and selection services,
  • trust and privacy management,
  • business process enactment or governance of active service  following a contracted business process,
  • contracting services for governing collaborations between enterprises,
  • service-oriented enterprise architectures to create shared concepts  between enterprises, 
  • computing platforms, such as cloud computing,
  • models of ecosystems within which collaborations are supported.

Besides this, an important trend is to move towards service-oriented enterprise architectures.

 

What are suitable topics for this seminar?

 
The main theme in 2013 will be focusing around Enterprise architecture principles, frameworks, and the role of enterprise architecture in software engineering, business governance, etc.  We also discuss enterpreise architecture relationship to service ecosystems principles.
 
However, if the number of registered students for the seminar grows large, half of the group can 
study as cases some larger scale interoperability utility solutions that have been sufficiently presented in the litterature. Each of the suggested solutions have somewhat different assumptions on the needs of the enterprises, and emphasise the solution design choises accordingly. Each student presentation can cover only some technical function of the architecture, or provide the overview only; it remains for the general discussion in the seminar sessions to draw comparative conclusions of the presented material. In order to support this discussion, some maturity models can be provided as a guideline by a student presentation.