Business-Oriented Enterprise Integration for Organizational Agility

For professionals, students, professors, and researchers with backgrounds in information technology, Qiu (information science, Pennsylvania State U. and Nanjing U. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China) demonstrates the application of business-oriented thinking to enterprise integration to meet an organization's needs for agility in the long term by using technologies and advances in enterprise computing. He focuses on technical challenges in applying enterprise computing, with a focus on a managerially, technically, and financially viable solution to support best practices in business operations in organizations. He details information systems integration patterns, the software application integration issues, and an approach to integrating enterprise information systems so that systems will be flexible and responsive. He discusses the evolution of computing and network technologies; the business needs for enterprise integration and the challenges involved; the basic integration mechanisms, patterns, and technologies; how middleware technologies emerged and evolved for managing distributed computing and services across enterprise systems; and how web services are deployed, published, located, and invoked over the heterogeneous networks using the service concept and modeling with Internet-based standard protocols. He describes hierarchical integration at data, method, API, and process levels, and the need to align enterprise systems and business objectives by leveraging disparate and distributed enterprise systems, global connectivity, and integration technologies, including advances in service-oriented architecture, enterprise service computing, and business process management. He does not cover big data, business intelligence, business analytics, cloud computing, social computing, or mobile computing in detail.