Enterprise Integration in the User Industries — Needs and Current Solutions

Abstract

The increasing pace of business change is emphasising the need to reconfigure business products, services, organisational structures, processes and even whole industries, where products can be created, delivered and abandoned in a fraction of the current time frame. The convergence of computers and communications technologies has provided the enterprise with new opportunities to redefine value chains, human roles, organisations and business processes. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will be a critical enabler for the future enterprise and will be strongly needed to meet the resulting reconfiguration requirements in a much shorter time.

The future enterprise will focus on less core competencies, but will concentrate on forming and dissolving value added partnerships in order to assure high flexibility enabling response to business opportunities. The future enterprise will be distributed, collaborative, virtual, networked, agile and capable of adapting to changes in the environmental. Changes which may be introduced by markets, technologies, capital or even society.

The paper will discuss the future enterprise and identify the technology gap existing between user needs and technological capabilities. Reference to AIT projects identifies current trends in technology development.