Grand challenges of enterprise integration

Enterprise integration is a discipline and enabling technology that connects and combines people, processes, systems, and technologies to ensure that the right people and the right processes have the right information and the right resources at the right time to optimally perform their functions. A consensus roadmap for technologies for enterprise integration was created as part of an industry/government/academic partnership in the Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative (IMTI). Two of the grand challenges identified by the IMTI roadmapping effort are addressed here: customer-responsive enterprises and totally connected enterprises. Each of these challenges is briefly discussed with respect to the current state of industry and the future-state vision as developed in the roadmap.