Requirements, barriers and trends in advanced technologies for the large scale engineering uptake

Corporations are today becoming largely distributed, and deeply founded on networking technology allowing to share and access information in different locations. In the same time, information systems have become the spinal chord of the modern enterprise, appropriate information tools satisfying fast reactive business requirements and offering a strategic corporate advantage. One of the main issues now is to ensure that the vital information, for which the virtual enterprise has a special dependency, is easily accessed and manipulated by multiple actor-oriented applications, thereby satisfying the need for improved customer service, on-time delivery, quality management and project co-ordination. With the popularity of the Web and its use in productive industry environments, the coupling of suppliers, manufacturers, and customers seems an attractive and reachable goal. Applications are requested to authorise employees, business partners and customers to access critical data from their desktop anywhere in the world over the Internet, supporting the browsing of data and documents contained in large electronic vaults by connecting to the server from any supported WEB browser client, provided they have appropriate access privilege. This paper aims at identifying, with a focus on the Building Construction sector, the current major requirements and barriers along with the possible use of new standard based technology in order to foster a better industrial exploitation of the large information sources located both on the WEB and in enterprises databases accessible through the WEB. Needs can be: * End-user and process oriented needs, like information modelling, persistent and coherent data storing, data exchange and distribution, availability and interoperability issues, concurrent access, security (i.e. data protection and confidentiality levels configuration), uniform access to any type of databases, uniform presentation on client side (i.e. not from any tool-oriented point of view), coupling of WEB data with internal corporate information, etc. * Needs in terms of computer-based systems, as open architecture, scalability, reusable components, integration of legacy systems, flexibility, and so on. Despite advances in computer technology providing more reliable and relevant mechanisms and tools for information management in the large, companies still deal with intricate and non flexible corporate information systems, with an increasing complexity in software development and use. To mask this complexity, we promote the concept of business objects (BO), which are software components encapsulating business rules and aiming at providing secure sophisticated access to diverse electronic content and applications. BO (*) are defined as components of the information system representing the enterprise business model, and are to be promising enablers to build information systems meeting end users and customers requirements, thus revealing critical to the success of the enterprise. BO will be managed in the WONDA (**) project, which aims at extending the infrastructure and services of current wide area networks towards a broader industrial and commercial usage, for the deployment of the information and communication infrastructure in the industry. WONDA will be a framework of open and interchangeable BO enabling configurability according to business solutions. It will offer an industry-wide and enterprise-wide framework for the development of WEB solutions to construction industry business needs, thus turning the WEB into a viable infrastructure for industrial manufacturing and commerce.