A Framework for Interoperability in an Enterprise

This study highlights benefits to the interoperability between heterogeneous and geographically distributed workgroups, generated by the adoption of an Enterprise Architecture Framework. These groups need to collaborate in order to execute business transactions scheduled by common activities, for both complex activities that involve a lot of people like the concurrent design of a mechanical component and activities that involve communication just between software applications. The problem of interoperability is part of a more complex scenario provided by the Business Process Management which allows, through the use of a suitable framework, to describe and implement enterprise business processes in order to get a faster process execution and a more efficient and robust process management. But to obtain advantages from this kind of management it is necessary to identify and to be able to describe adequately which is the useful process knowledge and who are the actors of the process. So you need methodologies and tools to capture and to implement process knowledge to share and make it available for people who need it. These methodologies and tools should be provided inside an Enterprise Architecture Framework, based on Enterprise Application Integration techniques using a common schema for data, which offers business process modelling capabilities