Technological trends are creating an emerging strategic need for seamless interoperability
Enterprises' business processes typically involve a number of business applications - both across and within enterprises. Different enterprises typically do not share business applications. And individual enterprises' architectures typically involve a variety of business applications - both by design and accident. Once there is more than one application, there is a potential need for interoperability.
Now the footprints of these applications are increasing to encompass significant chunks of the business processes. This is leaving many of the residual manual processes - whether within or across enterprises - as (apparently) little more than links between the applications. This creates a situation where the strategic focus on opportunities for improvement shift from automating the specific processes to automating the links between applications. Trends such as the globalisation of the world's economy mean these opportunities exist on a global scale.
Strategically the way is clear; either enterprises make their systems interoperate more and more closely - or get left behind. The long-term goal becomes to provide a framework for managing these links - enabling what can be called seamless interoperability.
Seamless interoperability brings new strategic capabilities
Automating the links creates end-to-end 'straight through' automated processes. This not only improves the existing process, it also creates strategic opportunities for new business models and corresponding threats to followers of the existing models. It further removes a major barrier to the strategic capability to quickly adapt business models to changing business conditions, by enabling business applications to be plug and played in the configurations needed to support changes in their business model.
Seamless interoperability also brings a significant (outstanding) challenge - semantic interoperability
While there are many promising solutions to the technological requirements, experience in implementing interoperability is showing that there is (at least) one significant challenge. This is semantical - in ensuring that the meaning of the data sent by one system is sufficiently well understood by the receiving system that it can process it properly.
BORO 's goal is to work with enterprises to meet this semantic interoperability challenge.
BORO aims to meet the semantic interoperability challenge by continuing to work with enterprises;
- developing and applying its methodology for extracting specifications of the semantic content - reference ontologies - from their business applications, and
- enhancing and extending its stock of reference ontologies available for re-use.
By working with enterprises, BORO aims to ensure that:
- its approach is focused on the real needs of enterprises, and
- enterprises get the full benefits of its approach, by applying it appropriately
