L’ERP est mort, vive L’AIA!?

Many say that the ICT landscape are on the eve of yet another major revolution. Yes, another. The Internet hype is just behind us and the financial implications have been cleaned up. The SOA (service oriented architecture) hype hasn’t even had its peak. And now is the latest developments passing us from the right. The developments in the ICT industry are faster than cars are leaving the first Ford  factory.

L’ERP est mort, vive L’AIA!?
The scholars have not yet agreed whether all dinosaurs died via a big bang or that this is done gradually. Thus, the trend watchers cannot even agree where ERP will extinct. It’s clear that these systems have had their longest time. As the newest ICT generation now looks pity at the Mainframe cowboys, over 20 years we will look with great surprise to the ERP people.

The dagger in the heart of ERP systems is called AIA. Application Integration Architecture. AIA is not a product but a methodology, Oracle is saying. But what is it? And what’s in it for customer?

Application Integration Architecture is a methodology, agreed by ICT systems builders, about communication between enterprise applications. Where Service Oriented Architecture was more or less an architecture to standardize two systems talking together, AIA is a methodology for complete system landscapes to talk to each other via a standard communication protocol.

More importantly, the approach is completely different. In today’s world, where trends are already old before they come to the market, the need for flexibility in the ICT systems become larger and larger. The ‘time-to-market’ cycle of a product in the past few years degreased enormously. The time to adjust your IT systems to adapt to this is also shorter. The choice often is to buy a system which is already in line with the wishes for that new product.

In addition, the call from end users to work process-oriented is increasing. The end user is not interested in what system he enters his data. He is also not willing to log into different systems when running through a business process from beginning to end. Because of AIA-processes are linking together systems so that the end user is using only one user layer during his work process. The data in the background is retrieved an stored in different systems.

So … AIA answers questions from the business. However, are current ERP systems ready for this? In daily practice, we see that many ERP users are struggling with core processes within multiple ERP systems. The already outdated SOA approach starts to land in the current architecture. The AIA business process-driven solutions is totally different than the current daily ICT-driven processes of ERP users.

In addition there is another complicating factor. In the ERP concept, there are different integrated modules. Human Resources talks with financial modules, Time Writing speak with Human Resources, Projects and Financial modules. This integration packages are delivered with the ERP products. From the AIA-thought the business is free to buy best-of-breed systems integrate in their ICT landscape. This means that many integrations to be made via the middleware layer. This middleware layer will orchestrate the processes between the different systems. Who will maintain these processes? Is there not coming a jumble of interfaces?

The AIA methodology is pretty strong. It will need to prove itself in practice. I believe the ERP era is not over yet. But there is a new kid on the block!

 Viewed 8543 times by 2135 visitors

Posted by: Administrator (4 post(s)).