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Designing an Integrated Enterprise Model to support Partnerships in the Geo-Information Industry
2 The virtual enterprise: the road towards collaborative work
Today’s dynamic business environment forces industrial and service sectors to work beyond their boundaries and operate in a more tightly coupled mode, forming integrated ‘virtual’ enterprises, to seize business opportunity. A Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary network of independent organisations (legally autonomous companies), that join functions with a particular objective. A VE is structured and managed in such a way that it is seen by third parties as an identifiable and complete organisation (one enterprise). The principles of the VE are: better customer satisfaction, reduced time-to-market and adaptation to changes in the surrounding environment. These principles are applied mainly with the aim of having a share in a wider global market. This approach provides an organizacin with enough exibility to handle an uncertain changing environment. These enterprises are called “virtual” because of their temporary nature, seizing certain, often short-lived, business. The products and services provided by VEs are dependent on innovation and are strongly customer-based.
Current developments in the industrial and service sectors are focusing on the concept of VE and in the issues that have to be addressed to achieve inter-organisational integration. The development of an integrated platform that enables interoperability and inter-working of functional entities within heterogeneous environment is required to make such an enterprise feasible. Further, special computer-based tools are required to manage cross-organisational information, processes, and work ows as well as the quality of services of such distributed enterprise [2, 12].
3 Impact on GIS market: going beyond the traditional boundaries of NMAs
The implementation of these new ideas of virtual communities, collaborative work, etc. and integrating processes and information from different organisations, for the delivery of products or services on the basis of common business understanding is an inevitable future characteristic of the GIS market worldwide. These developments lead to several consequences, which we considered in our research activities at ITC for further elaboration.
These consequences are, among others:
- Downsizing: organisations focus on their main competences, and make use of ready-made services from other providers, for those tasks, which are not their strength (outsourcing, collaboration with other or-ganisations).
- Collaborative work: it has become evident that satisfying the needs for a large variety of geo-spatial datasets and services, mostly in near-time mode, is beyond the capacity of a ‘single’ organisation. As organisation start to collaborate, they develop a need for new mechanisms, tools and ideas as to how to define, execute and manage collaborative processes.
- A different view of GDI: In the early days, GDI was meant to provide a mechanism, with technical and institutional arrangements, to access data hosted in distributed, mostly heterogeneous databases. From the ‘virtual enterprise’ perspective, a GDI is viewed as a mechanism that facilitates collaborative work, where it is possible to link autonomous, distributed, geo-information centres (data providers, value added service enablers, service providers and control units) to achieve business goals (see Section 4).
- Interoperable, distributed GIS functionality: GIS systems have been in existence since the 1970s, as stand-alone applications, independently developed by organisations in response to their specific needs. As a result, numerous incompatible data formats and spatial conceptions emerged; it became difficult to share and reuse this data across departments and disciplines which is associated with high reproduction costs. The growth of the Internet and the accompanying advances in communication technology are pushing the interoperability efforts to facilitate the sharing and distributing geodata. Furthermore, these technological advances are leading to the boom in Web mapping and Internet GIS. New GIS models emerge, based on the concept of unbundling functionalities in the current stand-alone systems to be delivered over the Internet, as independently developed, yet interoperable autonomous services [12, 14].
- Web services: there exists increasing interest in Web Map Services, as commercially available ready to use services delivered across the Internet, and the on-going OGC developments of standards for such services and their access via standard, interoperable, interfaces [11, 16, 17].
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