Titel des Beitrags

Over the last decades, companies and organizations have gradually built up an IT environment for supporting their informational and operational needs, very often resulting in numerous islands of application processing and information systems. The fragmentation into system islands now poses a problem, and integration as well as interoperability of disparate systems becomes a primary goal in order to increase work productivity, streamline business processes, or allow information exchange and collaboration between departments, organizations and business partners. The task of business integration, as it is often called, is dominated by the need to reuse existing, possibly autonomous systems, components, or information sources and has to overcome both distribution and heterogeneity of the application and information systems involved. Techniques and approaches to achieve integration can be divided into four major categories [JMP02]. • Portals are used to provide a single entry point to applications and information sources “on-the-glass” through an integrated end user interface that may be personalized and tailored to specific needs or usages. Often, a single sign-on capability is supported that permits the automatic propagation of identifying user information across different systems. • Business process integration attempts to orchestrate application processing tasks by integrating them as activities into business processes that may span organizational and company boundaries. Workflow management technology and business process modeling are employed to achieve this goal, and XML as well as web services are becoming increasingly important as a means to access applications and exchange information between (sub-) flows in a uniform manner.