Industry needs for integrated information services

Abstract

In this talk, we will discuss the increasing need for integrated information services in industry. Dynamic forces are driving the need for increasing levels of integration among data sources in industry. These forces are an increasingly competitive marketplace, in which a company's ability to profit is directly related to its ability to access and use information, an increasing trend toward merging business units, which requires the integration of disparate information systems in order for the resulting business unit to achieve economies of scale, and finally, an increasing trend toward companies becoming less horizontally or vertically integrated, which requires that they partner with other companies to respond to market demands.