UAL's integration road is not ending anytime soon. It has embarked ona business process integration project to manage its aircraftmechanicals. Not only do these involve some very expensive objects,they also impinge on customer satisfaction and revenues. When one ofits aircraft goes for a mechanical check-up, decisions have to be madeto avoid disruption to its business, such as finding another gate, orif it should cancel the flight altogether. Today, this process isfairly smooth due to its "experienced and smart" staff. "We rely ontheir knowledge and their ability to apply it, but those processesstill break down, because they rely on mechanical communication suchas phone calls. We are looking at business process integration to tieall those pieces together, so that we can be more complete in doingthat right. I don't think we have a problem with return on investmentand managing our aircraft better."

"The next step to me is knowledge integration. After touching onintegration from systems to processes, and information, the next levelis knowledge. And knowledge management is about capturing informationfrom warehouses and documents and getting that into a knowledge base,"he adds.

Not Integrated Yet

Not every company has acted like UAL and IP Communications inimplementing a standards-based integration infrastructure. "It's tooearly for all but the most forward thinking companies to have gottento the point of leveraging [a standards-based integration backbone],"says IDC's Rosen. "They may have saved money for specific projects butmost integration applications are very narrow in scope, almostdepartmentalised, in terms of the pieces of application that are beingintegrated. If you look at something like SAPSAP and Siebel, which hasclose to 15 common business objects, many companies when going tointegrate are only focusing on the customer and order object," shesays. Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de

Rosen is of the view that it would be very difficult for companies toapproach integration on a case-by-case basis, if they wanted toleverage its advantages, such as business process and productivityoptimisation, and involving applications in business change.