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The rapid advancements of enterprise applications urge organizations to access and process information in multiple incompatible systems accumulated as massive complex data in diversified formats due to lack of an accepted common base in the development community. EII solutions must provide interoperability across various software platforms with an ability to react and adapt enterprise operations in favour of continues internal and external environmental alterations dealing with time sensitive information. Concept of RTE is based upon the premise of getting the right information to the right people at the right time in “real time”. MDA specifications lead the industry towards interoperable, reusable, and portable software components as well as information models based on standard models. Recently, MDA is considered as another evolutionary step introducing an engineering discipline to practice pattern-based software development. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to achieve real-time intensive EII through combining respective strengths of MDA and RTE. Purpose is to discuss issues during architectural choices and trade-offs introducing the notion of intelligent enterprise integration. Preliminary observation reveals that the strategy provides consistent architectural framework and significantly reduces integration cost. The paper also reports potential advantages and implications of real-time EII over existing business models.

An enterprise model is a computational representation of the structures, activities, processes, information, resources, behaviour, people, goals and constraints of organizational system or other enterprise. Moving to real-time operations has gain competitive advantages by reducing lead times and improving efficiency furthermore responsiveness to customer demands. Real-time enterprise (RTE) mission is the expansion of product and capital market valuation through time-dependent production across a grid connected federation of cooperating entities. RTE requires at its foundation a dynamic modeling of distributed systems that scales from low-level processes to high-level strategies. This paper reports on recent advances that examined the capabilities of RTE modeling methodologies to express organizational settings within active infrastructure. Selecting appropriate RTE solution and measuring its impact brings set of sophisticated benchmarking data to track technology trends that matter.

Real-Time Enterprises Development Features with Anticipation of Information Change: Preliminary Findings

Recent industry trends, global competition, and technological innovations are driving enterprises to either adapt or develop practices of real-time enterprises (RTE). RTE are organizations that enable automation of processes spanning different systems, media, and enterprise boundaries. It provides time sensitive information to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners implementing processes to ensure that all information is up-to-date and consistent for “adaptability” to change and accept “change as the process”. Real-time operations facilitate enterprises to gain competitive advantages by reducing lead times and improving efficiency as well as responsiveness to customer demands. Enterprises desire to recognize that “real-time” means different effects in different elements of the business before stirring to RTE.

The challenge lies to address the reactions of organizations in respond to external anxieties such as globalization and the rapid fluctuations of the market, however, dealing with different perspectives and organizational structures or cultures. The primary question is: to what extend if the specific organizational structure of information system (IS) characterized as RTE? This leads to the initial steps in the direction of accumulating known and investigated differences in structure, strategy formation, and work enclosed during design and implementation of RTE. If we are able to provide comprehensive and holistic development methods to integrate social interpretations, organizational processes, and contexts then it certainly be enriched in general. Legacy application and data structure have become entrenched in organizations and significantly hinder information flow across infrastructure. Inconsistency, fragmentation, and duplication are the hallmark of most stovepipe infrastructures. The key to unleashing the power of RTE lies at the intersection of three essential restraints; integration, transformation, and reuse. Vendors advocate that integration is part of the development process. The risk in pursuing “development + integration” strategy is that the applications begin to include integration logic and as a result, business processes, data routing, and data mapping become baked into the applications. It compels developers to revise each application with corresponding changes in enterprise. Preserving the separation between development and integration is critical to achieving business agility.

RTE must be prepared to anticipate and manage a host of behavioral and organizational changes caused by the introduction of an integrated IS. Due to network of interdependencies in IS, the anticipation of information change needs to be assessed, evaluated, and improved for future harnesses. Developers are required to comprehend when design extends beyond their own decision making competence based on a detailed analysis and techniques. Thus, developing RTE within specified infrastructure is incremental and progressive in nature. Primary advantages through the evolutionary steps to building RTE are lower integration and operational cost, ability to add and remove applications without disrupting services, end-to-end process visibility, reduction in barriers to collaboration, strategy-driven business process design, and flexibility to restructure applications to meet evolving mission requests.

During our simulation study and analysis to develop RTE, we have identified requirements addressing information change that includes collective planning, design decisions, integration issues, specific cooperation support, standardization, and service processes. We discuss limitations along with advantages of modern approaches introducing our view and conclusions to develop generalized RTE. Further research is devoted in two directions, service processes and RTE extensions, respectively. We anticipate implicating RTE in different domain and investigate the criteria towards domain characterization that are valuable to select methodologies for development process.

Comprehensive viability in enterprise modeling is characterized by an increasing rate of information change in real-time. Widely adapted model driven approaches to construct real-time enterprises (RTE) requires introducing meta-levels and abstractions to each element of system infrastructure that is subject to reliability, scalability, and heterogeneity. Complex and dynamic nature of RTE information integration (REI) combines different innovative product development lifecycles, processes, and enterprise models in global competition. The system infrastructure should be linked to propagate the changes for consistency during execution.

Recent industry driven research indicates that a pattern of successful transformation strategies has emerged worthy of discussion. Specially, organizations attempted transformations with a series of “well-defined” programs have been more successful during enterprise integration. Transformation requires a substantial change of the organization’s culture, processes, and technologies signifies that it is difficult, time consuming, and expensive on resources. The indispensable aspect that process transformation requires to consider during REI is the validity of information including data, operations, and processes with respective to the specified constraints associated with them.

During our research, many issues prohibiting process transformation were discovered. The most prevalent and limiting issue in regard to transformation is the lack of formal specification and standardization. This paper addresses the need to accelerate transformation effort and rationale process transformation. We identified and present essential characteristics of process transformation in REI environment.

Complex and dynamic nature of real-time enterprise information integration (REI) combines different innovative product development lifecycles, processes, and enterprise models in global competition. The system infrastructure is linked to propagate changes for consistency during execution. REI focuses primarily on the function of model that guides choices of the infrastructure form to accelerate strategic execution. REI operates at speeds with split-second reaction times that may far exceed speeds of gathering and processing of information, analysis, and response.

REI must be prepared to anticipate and manage a host of behavioral and organizational changes caused by the introduction of an integrated information system. The process management requires to be addressed at a fundamental level to the continuing mission critical business operations. It is at the foundation incorporating rapid changes to implemented processes such that the latest information about process status and downstream expectation are available.

The prime to managing change or virtual enterprise is to understanding the behavior of the enterprise itself. Real-time simulation facilitates the construction of REI models. The model may also be used by the management team for continuous improvement of the system infrastructure to optimize technology utilization, increase throughput, identify bottlenecks, and identify resource utilization. Managers may directly manipulate REI models to change process structure and execution.

We have identified necessity of process management and typical components of process modeler during the alliance of REI with business models. In this paper, we describe the technical and business issues associated with process management and summarize experiences gained in implicating REI that is used with process transformation in the service oriented industries. This paper also illustrates a prototype version of simulation tools that supports analysis of the actors and issues perspectives. We then conceptualize REI, aimed at capturing a “core” set of structural and behavioral concepts, including relationships that are fundamental in the process management description through significant business decisions.

Keywords: Enterprise architecture, Information integration, Model driven, Process management, Real-time system infrastructure, Transformation.

Managing Density of Requirements during ION Product Development

Telecommunications service providers have embraced Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) as the most cost-effective technology for increasing the capacity of optical fiber networks. Intelligent Optical Network (ION) now promises intelligent transport services that allow clients such as routers and switches to interconnect using optical interfaces. Efforts to standardize intelligent control plane have reached various stages in several bodies such as IETF, ITU-T and OIF to provide a scalable, interoperable, and distributed control plane that is applicable to multiple network technologies. It is increasingly difficult for carriers to meet customer’s requirements and still ensure their own profitability due to multiple incompatible network layer interfaces and functional overlap between the layers. As bandwidth requirements increase by orders of magnitude, the most pressing issue is “how to manage and control large optical networks?” Passive and active components of ION are continuing to evolve.

The current trend in the software industry is to position significant effort for reducing the high cost of product development through focusing on system requirements engineering such as generating correct dependencies from a formal requirements specification or creating set of test cases for ION service could provide dramatic cost savings. Our approach is to modify and enhance capabilities of available open source web-enabled distributed requirements specification tool (DRES 0.8) to automate and analyze density of requirements. Primary enrichment is requirements traceability feature aiming at defining relationships between ION service requirements and artifacts produced during the product development life-cycle. Methods for maintaining accurate requirements are thrust of this paper.

SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Organization’s distributed and evolving enterprises demands an integrated approach providing consolidated control and secure information sharing among users and applications in support of business processes. Businesses faced considerable challenges due to unawareness of setting an integration infrastructure with specific business context. Recent industry trend is inclined to investigate rapid and cost effective BPI platform with indisputable business benefits in terms of Real-Time Enterprise Content Management (RT-ECM). RT-ECM ensures consistency among users and infrastructure. The perception also provides secure access to necessary and valid content in real-time. Modern RT-ECM architectures are focused to assist content sharing across multiple resources as well as enterprise applications. SOA, a distributed computing environment, is poised at the intersection of business and technology. SOA enables enterprises to seamlessly and rapidly adapting altering environment. Service-Oriented RT-ECM approach offers integration specific, flexible, and featured BPI platform. The contribution of this paper is an RT-ECM architecture framework illustrating most prominent technical challenges during establishment of business process perceptive integration and time sensitive content flow management. Real-time content management engines, business process engines, and service provisioning are at the centre of presented framework. Initiative behind the research effort is to capture and estimate generic aspects of BPI such that organizations may exclusively focus on unique business characteristic. Eventually, the paper discusses advantages and consequences of service oriented RT-ECM besides outstanding issues for further research