Page 312 -

Q7-7 How Do Inter-enterprise IS Solve the Problems of Enterprise Silos?

Q7-7 How Do Inter-enterprise IS Solve the Problems 311
of Enterprise Silos?

The discussion in Q7-4 illustrated the primary ways that enterprise systems solve the problems
of workgroup information silos. In this question we will use the PRIDE example to show you how
inter-enterprise systems can accomplish the same for enterprise silos. (The transition is shown by
the lower arrow leading to the bottom row in Figure 7-6, page 293.)
Figure 7-18 shows the information silos that exist among healthcare providers, health clubs,
and patients, the principal PRIDE users. Providers keep track of patient histories and maintain
records of exercise recommendations, which are called exercise prescriptions in the PRIDE sys-
tem. Health clubs maintain membership, class, personal trainer, and exercise performance data.
At the club, the latter is gathered automatically from exercise equipment and member heart moni-
tors and stored in a club database. At home, individuals generate exercise data on heart monitors
and equipment; those data are recorded in mobile devices using exercise watches.
The isolation of this exercise data causes problems. For example, doctors would like to
have reports on exercise data stored in patient devices and in health clubs. Patients would
like to have prescription data from their providers as well as exercise data from their time at
health clubs. Health clubs would like to have exercise prescriptions and home workout data
to integrate with the data they have. All three entities would like to produce reports from the
integrated data.
Figure 7-19 shows the structure of an inter-enterprise system that meets the goals of the three
types of participant. In this figure, the labeled rectangles inside the cloud represent mobile applications
that could be native, thin-client, or both. Some of the application processing might be done on cloud
servers as well as on the mobile devices. Those design decisions are not shown. As illustrated, this sys-
tem assumes that all users receive reports on mobile devices but, because of the large amount of keying
involved, that healthcare providers submit and manage prescriptions using a personal computer.
As you can see, prescription and exercise data are integrated in the PRIDE database; that inte-
grated data is processed by a reporting application (Chapter 9) to create and distribute the reports
as shown.
Systems like that shown in Figure 7-19 are referred to as distributed systems because
applications processing is distributed across multiple computing devices. Standards such as http,
https, html5, css3, JavaScript, and SOA using Web services enable programs to receive data from,
and display data to, a variety of mobile and desktop devices.
PRIDE data is requested and delivered using JSON.

Healthcare Providers Health Clubs Patients at Home

Patient history Membership data Heart monitor data
Exams
Operations Class data
Hospital stays Treadmill, bike
Medications exercise data
Patient progress Personal trainer data
Exercise Exercise Watch data recorded
prescriptions
performance data in mobile devices
Figure 7-18
Information Silos Without PRIDE Information Silos