Enterprise Innovation

12Raw Data Connection Services and Tools

Data interoperability is one of the top concerns in virtual enterprise environments. One specific aspect of this problem is the cross-organization measurement of business performance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can depend on heterogeneous data maintained in different information systems: a software infrastructure is required in order to collect these data and to present it to consumers, both humans and ICT systems, in a homogeneous way. This chapter reports on BIVEE’s raw data connection services and tools (RDCSs), which address these requirements by leveraging advanced extract-transform-load (ETL) techniques and a common KPI reference ontology.

12.1. Introduction

Virtual enterprise environments are, by their very nature, backed by distributed information systems. The term “distributed” means, in this context, not necessarily “geographically sparse” but rather “heterogeneous”. As a matter of fact, virtual enterprises are not designed as such from the ground up: they aggregate existing organizations, each of them contributing their own assets and information resources. Not surprisingly, building a virtual enterprise is also a matter of data integration.

Information can be literally anything (e.g. knowledge, product lifecycle data, etc.), but here we will focus on one specific aspect of governance: performance monitoring – i.e. the continuous assessment of how business processes are performing. To undertake performance monitoring, ...