CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices

Enabling Technologies

This section discusses popular technologies that are widely used to achieve the kinds of integration discussed in the previous section.

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)

EDI (electronic data interchange) was originally developed in the mid-1970s and 1980s in order to reduce the procurement costs by minimizing delay and errors from suppliers. It has been in widespread use as a technique for conducting data-level integration between heterogeneous systems for both intra-enterprise and interenterprise applications. EDI is essentially a group of defined standard communication protocols for applications—for instance, ANSI X12 from the American National Standard Institute and EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, ...