Information-Integrated Enterprises

Abstract

The Berlin Wall didn’t fall as a direct result of information technology, but the fall of organizational walls certainly has. Information Technologies (IT) such as telecommunications, distributed computing, and databases have afforded people a phenomenal degree of freedom to form working relationships with others from anywhere in the world, and rearrange those working relationships with great alacrity as missions and conditions change, expand, or otherwise evolve. People and organizations have a growing potential to distribute throughout the world while remaining in dynamic alignment with other economic partners and valuable resources. IT has freed the enterprise from its history of geographical and physical constraints that allowed only for fixed and static alignment of resources, processes, and organizations with missions. As a result, the past decades have witnessed a parade of new business strategies focusing on the potential of the new enterprise. In the late 1970s and 1980s, we strove to create Computer-Integrated Manufacturing and Concurrent Engineering. Since then, we have seen a continuous stream of new visions each promoting a new enterprise model that claims to improve productivity, quality, and market timing. These models have included Agile Manufacturing, Virtual Corporation, Total Quality Management, Enterprise Re-engineering, Horizontal Corporation, Electronic Commerce, Global Information Enterprises, and many more models adopted within particular contexts, such as the Adaptive Integrated Manufacturing Enterprises developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.