ODU CS Colloquium: Facilitating Agility through Emerging Technologies

By Ramani Vaidyanathan

IT systems and business processes are fragmented and hard-wired with
minimum leverage or flexibility to deal with the ever changing demands
of customers, partners and suppliers. As a result of such fragmentation,
Organizations have grown disparate data stores, tightly-coupled software
applications, disconnected enterprise systems, redundant business
processing logic & data and continue to proliferate over the years.

The current business and economic conditions dictate that enterprises, in
order to sustain competitive advantage, respond quickly to the changes in
the market and become agile. Desired core agile characteristics include
high degree of leverage, speed and flexibility for mapping the existing
and emerging internal business processes to the external PEST (political,
Economic, Social, & Technological) demands that are in a constant state
of flux.

Emerging technologies play a vital role to enable enterprises define
their vision and continually refine their strategies and tactical
execution plans to achieve the desired agility. While the list of such
technologies is too long to mention, the most significant ones that draws
our attention include `Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) & Web
Services', `Service Oriented Architecture & Event Driven Architecture',
`Portals & Dashboards' and `Wireless & Mobile Solutions'. The gradual
impacts of these methodologies and technologies demonstrates a compelling
need for a presence of enterprise standard Integration platform to
facilitate service orientation, messaging backbone, and an event driven
nervous system.  This presentation explains business trends, drivers, and
solution architecture principles behind the aforementioned technologies
for enabling agility to enterprises.