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This paper describes issues related to the goal of unifying the various disparate components of current business systems. Current enterprise-wide systems are usually made up of a number of individual applications that communicate through batch data transfer, messaging and transaction middleware, or APIs. This approach requires independent maintenance of many systems that are often quite different as well as maintenance of the links between them. On top of having disparate systems inside an organization is the problem of even more disparate systems outside the organization such as those of partners or clients.
In some large businesses this seems to work all right because divisions of the business are often as fragmented as the systems they use. Even in those situations greater efficiency could be achieved through systems that communicate and operate in a more uniform way. Small and medium sized businesses cannot generally afford the cost of maintaining so many disparate systems, so much of the functionality found in the systems of large businesses is not found among smaller businesses.
This problem has no immediately apparent solution. Because vendors of different vertical applications do similar things in so many different ways, tighter integrations between them are difficult. Over the history of enterprise computing some horizontal pieces of enterprise systems that can be shared among vertical applications have started to become their own pieces. The first major example of this was using databases as a common persistent storage mechanism. More recently some businesses have tried to standardize as much as possible on many other horizontal pieces of the system such as: analysis tools such as reporting and ad-hoc query tools, operating systems, programming languages and so forth.
Refactoring enterprise automation systems is the idea of identifying pieces of vertical applications that can be converted to common use or horizontal components, then creating those horizontal components and using a common set of them as the foundation for all of the vertical applications in the enterprise-wide system. A system like this has many advantages. It is easier to maintain because the same skill-set can be used throughout the enterprise and it is more efficient to build and customize because tools that are used a lot will be available as part of the core foundation. Less code will have to be written, tested and maintained because more of it will be shared. No one (or very few people) would want to write their own compiler, operating system, database, web server or many other components because it requires a lot of work and very stable and affordable options are available. In the future more and more components of enterprise systems will be viewed in this way. Some components of vertical applications cannot be shared because they are unique to certain operations, but the industry as a whole is far from reaching the point where all possible components of vertical applications are turned into horizontal components.
This is one of the main goals for the development efforts of the Open For Business Project. Our goal is to provide an enterprise-wide business automation system as a service to those who use. We plan to do this by building a large set of vertical applications that all operate on a common foundational framework. As much of the functionality as possible will live in the foundation layer as horizontal components and will be common among all of the vertical applications in the system.
Here is a list of the major horizontal components that we plan to include in our foundation: