The distributed/collaborative enterprise architecture allows a business to analyze its internal processes in new ways that are defined by changing business opportunities instead of by preconceived systems design (such as monolithic data processing applications). In this architectural design, an object model represents all aspects of the business; what is known, what the business does, what are the constraints, and what are the interactions and the relationships. A business model is used to integrate and migrate parts of legacy systems to meet the new business profile.
Distributed/collaborative enterprise builds its new business applications on
top of distributed business models and distributed computing
technology. Applications are built from standard interfaces with "plug and
play" components. At the core of this infrastructure is an off-the-shelf,
standards-based, distributed object computing, messaging communication
component such as an Object Request
Broker (ORB) that meets Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standards.
This messaging communication hides the following from business applications:
- the implementation details of networking and protocols
- the location and distribution of data, process, and hosts
- production environment services such as transaction management, security, messaging reliability, and persistent storage
The message communication component links the organization and connects it to computing and information resources via the organization's local or wide area network (LAN or WAN). The message communication component forms an enterprise-wide standard mechanism for accessing computing and information resources. This becomes a standard interface to heterogeneous system components.
The distributed/collaborative enterprise architecture is being applied in
industries and businesses such as banking, investment, trading,
credit-granting, insurance, policy management and rating, customer service,
transportation and logistics management, telecommunications (long distance,
cellular, and operating company), customer support, billing, order handling,
product cross-selling, network modeling, manufacturing equipment, and
automobiles
[Shelton 93].
The most common implementations of objects and object models are written in
C++ or Smalltalk. Another popular language for implementing object and object
models is Java.
Available for use in a distributed/collaborative enterprise architecture are products being built to open system standards, operating systems, database management systems, transaction processor monitors, and ORBs. These products are increasingly interchangeable.
Since 1993 a number of companies have built and used distributed/collaborative
architectures to address their long-term business needs because this model
adapts to change and is built according to open system standards
[Adler 95].
Distributed/collaborative enterprise architectures are limited by the lack of commercially-available, object-oriented analysis and design method tools that focus on applications (rather than large scale business modeling).
The evolution of CORBA (see Common Object
Request Broker Architecture) and COM/DCOM
(see Component Object Model (COM), DCOM, and
Related Capabilities), and the results of standards bodies such as X/Open
[X/Open
96] and
Object Management Group (OMG)
[OMG 96] will affect the evolution of distributed/collaborative architectures.
Three tier client/server architectures (see Three Tier Software Architectures) are an alternative approach to distributed/collaborative architectures. However, they do not address the need to evolve the business model over time as well as the distributed/collaborative architecture does.
Distributed/collaborative enterprise architectures are enhanced by
object-oriented design technologies (see Object-Oriented Design).
This technology is classified under the following categories. Select a
category for a list of related topics.
