Enterprise frameworks characteristics, criteria, and challenges

s information technology provides industry with the means to identify new product and service opportunities, the increasing demand for these products and services places new demands on information technology. This cycle has created unprecedented requirements for integrated enterprise systems and applications, which are capable of modeling rapid changes in business policies, workflow and information processing. A new breed of systems we refer to as object-oriented enterprise frameworks (OOEFs) has emerged to address these requirements. Our research has studied the trends in OOEFs [5, 6], the guidelines for developing OOEFs, and the economic benefits of enterprise frameworks [7]. OOEFs are designed to reduce the complexity and cost of enterprise systems, and therefore have become strategic assets for organizations across all business sectors. Evidence of this is reflected in the recent entry of flexible and extensible products for enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), product data management (PDM), customer service/sales order processing, and other commercially available, framework-based applications. While the Object Management Group’s (OMG) Web site identifies several successes in missioncritical enterprise applications leveraging CORBA, it is not our intent to take a position in the CORBA versus DCOM debate—as we will see, interoperability is only one of many characteristics of an OOEF. Rather, we hope to discuss the pragmatic issues that face decision-makers, and to establish a formal set of criteria to be used in building or selecting an enterprise framework. Framework requirements are generally defined by an independent standards body (CORBA is one example), a Software Vendor (Microsoft’s MFC, COM and DCOM, FASTech’s FACTORYworks, IBM’s San Francisco Project, Philips’ New York Project) or a Systems Engineering Group (Motorola’s CIM Baseline). Frameworks combine the best features of state-of-the-art programming languages, development environments, and tools. In addition, frameworks provide an extensive library of business objects supporting the intended application domain. At one time or other, every developer or development team has created a framework. Such frameworks often Enterprise Frameworks Characteristics, Criteria, and Challenges