A VISIONARY TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE FORMS THE FOUNDATION

As supply chain efforts progress, stovepipe thinking and point-to-point technical
integration give way to flexible, business-processbased
architectures. The complexity and diversity
of enterprise systems, the growth of middleware,
and the drive for the next level of efficiency and
productivity, both within and across organizational
boundaries, mandate process thinking. But unlike
reengineering, today�s processes must be directly
executable and evolve incrementally, with minimal
impact on business operations. It is for this environment that CSC e4SM has
been designed.
The future enterprise will be
complex, federated, connected,
collaborative, dynamic,
constantly evolving,
and unpredictable.
CSC e4SM provides the flexibility of approach that enables a firm to adapt
its infrastructure to new business conditions (for example, acquisitions) and new
technologies, without the need for wholesale changes and integration retesting.
It has been especially designed to meet the future architecture challenges facing
most businesses attempting to excel at extended enterprise processing. As the
evolution of IT infrastructure and architecture continues, exploiting existing and
emerging technologies, CSC e4SM seeks to address many of the problems facing
businesses and their supply chains today and bring answers to many questions:
_ How does a business operate in a state of perpetual change and adaptation?
_ How does an individual firm become an enabler of business process change
while not throwing away the investments made in legacy systems?
_ How does a company integrate IT following mergers or acquisition?
_ How does a business operate with some of the world�s largest companies
while also gaining value from some of the smallest and more
innovative firms?
_ How can a firm provide a cost-effective, common multichannel Web
access for users, suppliers, and customers?
_ How does a business take cost-effective advantage of new access
technologies?
_ How does a business organization and its allies implement IT architecture
that will dynamically grow with business and IT objectives?
_ How are third-party applications brought in, without major business risk
and upheaval?
_ How can a business achieve �true� collaboration with business partners
and service providers?