9.7 Conclusion
9.7 Conclusion What is important about XML? Actually, why does IEBI care about XML? As we have repeated many times throughout this text, IEBI is significantly different from BI. It extends across the entire breadth of the value chain, reaching back through our suppliers to the very beginnings of the value chain. It also looks forward all the way to the end user . IEBI is also deeper than traditional BI. While some have seen BI as the purview of the C-level executive and top-level decision makers , IEBI reaches down to the depths of the organization. It permeates all processes and all activities. The Internet has created the actual physical connections, however circuitous, between systems throughout the world. Through these connections, we can establish the electronic means of communications of the participants in our value chain. We need more than that, though. We need a means to create applications that can execute across this structure. We need the software that can run across this environment. Java fills this role: Java is a programming language and platform for the development of applications across the Internet. It has enabled us to reach across the Internet to connect with our suppliers. It has also enabled us, with its various editions, to reach down into our organization to provide support for the plethora of devices that are now able to connect to the Internet. Having the hardware and the software is only part of the picture. We still need data. After all, both hardware and software exist for one purpose: to deliver data to the decision maker. In the old days, when we were all running in proprietary environments, we each had our own way to represent data: EBCIDIC and ASCII. Even in the two- tier client/server days, it was still pretty simple. The output devices all had relatively the same characteristics, and we all spoke ASCII. Today we are in a brave new world, a world in which we use many different types of devices with many different characteristics. XML provides the common language for the representation of the data across these many systems. With XML, we can communicate not only the actual content of the data, but its structure as well. We can use this common language to distribute our data to these many devices. We can see where XML sits in the IEBI structure . At the base, we have the hardware that provides the connection between system. The applications sit on top of this hardwarethis is Java. The applications provide the processing. The data is expressed in XML, and XSL provides the translation of the data for the various devices. It tops off the stack.  |
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