This is a handbook in the true sense: aiming at managers, engineers and business people, it covers methods and tools necessary to define or redefine enterprises of all kind, as well as to structure the implementation into manageable projects. This book was born from the marriage of management science with engineering in its broadest sense, never losing the business objective: enterprise integration aims at establishing healthy, dynamic enterprises which serve their customers and stakeholders in the best possible way.

An interesting outcome of this marriage is that what earlier seemed to be separate disciplines, such as enterprise engineering, systems and software engineering, project management, and industrial and manufacturing engineering, suddenly become unified into one under one powerful theory of enterprise entities. However, this unification is not overtaking or destroying the individual efforts, it rather allows the significant details of these discipline to fit together.

The more information and communication technology (ICT) matures, the less it needs to try dictating how business is conducted. As ICT is becoming a mature ubiquitous infrastructure, the complexity of designing a business is reduced, giving rise to an explosion of dynamic creation of various enterprises.

This trend leads to the possibility of creating systems more complex then ever, with their design relying on the building block principle. Similarly as a modern computer system is not designed any more from transistors and resistors, a modern enterprise must be designed and built from trusted components, using a universally accepted set of combination rules: a kind of 'enterprise plug and play'!

The fabric of enterprise is an information systems mediated web of human relationships – and, with the ready availability of the technology, enterprise integration looks at how to create and continuously recreate such webs to achieve some objective. In the same way as an architect uses both artistic and technical drawings to express the idea of a new building, an enterprise architect uses various models or representations to express the idea of a new or transformed enterprise. So, if you want, this book's audience is a new breed of people: the enterprise architect.

Table of contents

| Series: International Handbooks on Information Systems | Springer Verlag |
Handbook of Enterprise Architecture | Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems