What is your understanding of integrated view of the

Question

What is your understanding of integrated view of the organization and its relations with suppliers and customers? If an organization wants to be competitive, what needs to be done in the system integration aspect? Do you think the CRM (customer relationship management) system should also be integrated with internal enterprise supply chain? You may relate to your organization's IT/IS status in this report.

We have to write a report on basis of following: 

Enterprise System Integration is a constant challenge for IT professionals. The M&A of different companies usually lead to inter-organizational level process integration. The ERP initiative leads to enterprise application integration. The upgrade of legacy system usually leads to middleware integration. The competition demands more efficiency from the business process, which, in turn, requires constant integration of different applications within or across organization.

We start our investigations of system integration with three levels as proposed by Hasselbring [1]: 

1. Intra-organizational process integration, where a business process reengineering (BPR) is usually expected; 
2. Enterprise application integration (EAI), a semantic level integration, where the resources of the enterprise are integrated via enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology; 
3. Middleware integration, a level, where techniques like CORBA, database gateways, etc. were employed to syntactically connect different information systems or components.  

There are four articles introduced in this article addressing these three levels respectively. Yang and Papazoglou's paper [2] address the integration of business architecture layer or the first level; the Grimson et al. paper [3] address the application integration level; the Rundensteiner et al. [4] and Adam et al. [5] address issues in the middleware integration level.

I hope this opening article as well as four other articles could help us understand the challenge and core issues of enterprise systems integration and serve as a starting point for later study.  

Two other articles for this week's review are: a comparison between ERP and EAI in enterprise integration with very detailed analysis and illustration by Lee et al [6].; a classic article on the subject of enterprise integration from strategic perspective by Davenport [7]. 

1. Hasselbring, W., Information System Integration. Communications of the ACM, 2000. 43(6): p. 32-38. 

2. Yang, J. and M.P. Papazoglog, INTEROPERATION SUPPORT FOR ELECTRONIC BUSINESS. Communications of the ACM, 2000. 43(6): p. 39-47. 

3. Grimson, J., W. Grimson, and W. Hasselbring, The SI Challenge in Health Care. Communications of the ACM, 2000. 43(6): p. 48-55. 

4. Rundensteiner, E.A., A. Koeller, and Z. Xin, Maintaining Data Warehouses Over Changing Information Sources. Communications of the ACM, 2000. 43(6): p. 57-62. 

5. Adam, N.R., V. Atluri, and I. Adiwijaya, SI in Digital Libraries. Communications of the ACM, 2000. 43(6): p. 64-72. 

6. Lee, J., K. Siau, and S. Hong, Enterprise Integration with ERP and EAI. Communications of the ACM, 2003. 46(2): p. 54-60. 

7. Davenport, T.H., Putting the Enterprise into the Enterprise System. Harvard Business Review, 1998. 76(4): p. 121-131.