ABSTRACT
Integration seems to be one of the most important strategic priorities mainly because new innovative business solutions demand integration of different business units, business systems, enterprise data, and applications. Integrated information systems improve the competitive advantage with unified and efficient access to the information. Integrated applications make it much easier to access relevant, coordinated information from a variety of sources. It is clear that replacing existing systems with new solutions will often not be a viable proposition. Companies soon realize that the replacement is more complicated, more complex, more time consuming, and more costly than even their worst-case scenarios could have predicted: too much time and money have been invested in them, and there is too much knowledge incorporated in these systems. Therefore, standard ways to reuse existing systems and integrate them into the global, enterprise-wide information system must be defined.
