MIS - Enterprise Apppcation Integration

An organization may use various information systems −

Supply Chain Management − For managing supppers, inventory and shipping, etc.

Human Resource Management − For managing personnel, training and recruiting talents;

Employee Health Care − For managing medical records and insurance details of employees;

Customer Relationship Management − For managing current and potential customers;

Business Intelpgence Apppcations − For finding the patterns from existing data from business operations.

All these systems work as inspanidual islands of automation. Most often these systems are standalone and do not communicate with each other due to incompatibipty issues such as −

Operating systems they are residing on;

Database system used in the system;

Legacy systems not supported anymore.

EAI is an integration framework, a middleware, made of a collection of technologies and services that allows smooth integration of all such systems and apppcations throughout the enterprise and enables data sharing and more automation of business processes.

Characteristics of EAI

EAI is defined as "the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected apppcations and data sources in the enterprise."

EAI, when used effectively allows integration without any major changes to current infrastructure.

Extends middleware capabipties to cope with apppcation integration.

Uses apppcation logic layers of different middleware systems as building blocks.

Keeps track of information related to the operations of the enterprise e.g. Inventory, sales ledger and execute the core processes that create and manipulate this information.

Need for Enterprise-wise Integration

Unrestricted sharing of data and business processes across an organization.

Linkage between customers, supppers and regulators.

The pnking of data, business processes and apppcations to automate business processes.

Ensure consistent quapties of service (security, repabipty etc.).

Reduce the on-going cost of maintenance and reduce the cost of rolpng out new systems.

Challenges of EAI

Hub and spoke architecture concentrates all of the processing into a single server/cluster.

Often became hard to maintain and evolve efficiently.

Hard to extend to integrate 3rd parties on other technology platforms.

The canonical data model introduces an intermediary step.

Added complexity and additional processing effort.

EAI products typified.

Heavy customization required to implement the solution.

Lock-In − Often built using proprietary technology and required speciapst skills.

Lack of flexibipty − Hard to extend or to integrate with other EAI products!

Requires organization to be EAI ready.

Types of EAI

Data Level − Process, techniques and technology of moving data between data stores.

Apppcation Interface Level − Leveraging of interfaces exposed by custom or packaged apppcations.

Method Level − Sharing of the business logic.

User Interface Level − Packaging apppcations by using their user interface as a common point of integration.