CC-01-160 Building an Extensible Platform for E-Business

Description:

As businesses move from the arena of individual achievement to an age of collaborative accomplishments, the importance of the company’s Management Information System increases. The world today revolves around integration and integration revolves around data modeling. Although integration is the stuff that makes up life, it has also proven almost as difficult and illusive as determining its meaning. The nature of business has evolved over the last 20 years. While business processes were once fixed, today they are rapidly changing and evolving. In addition, the uses for Management Information Systems have also changed over the last 20 years. While businesses once undertook internal developments that focused on financial systems, today companies are turning more and more to outsourcing and attempting to integrate information from diverse sources. To support these changes, the tools and techniques used to develop the information systems need also evolve. While an object-oriented approach offers many desirable characteristics and has found its way into most application programming languages, relational models for data modeling still offer greater flexibility and performance for ad-hoc data queries and still maintain the greater market share. Building an abstract data model using a relational database management system, but incorporating key concepts of object-oriented programming such as inheritance and overloading, provides a platform that is both flexible as well as extensible.