IT Architectures and B2B Integration at BMW Group

Hartmut Liefke

BMW Group, Germany

The high productivity and automatization in the automotive industry is largely due to the support of complex business processes by innovative information technologies. Sophisticated engineering, manufacturing, and retail processes are implemented within large-scale applications based on a variety of heterogeneous platforms. The first part of the presentation will show how the BMW Group Competence Center of IT Architectures defines, classifies, and propagates IT architectures for the world-wide BMW Group IT organization. Based on the notion of master architectures and master solutions, we will show how generic solutions, such as for enterprise application integration, portals, application servers, business intelligence, CRM, etc. are developed and implemented in large-scale projects. In the second part, one specific, but rather important architectural topic will be addressed: inter-enterprise integration between BMW Group and its partners. The talk will explain how partner integration scenarios are classified and how aspects of B2B integration, such as data transformation, process management, security, and standardization, must be implemented to meet business requirements.

Bio

Hartmut Liefke is a member of the Competence Center for IT Architectures at BMW Group in Munich, Germany. He is responsible for developing company-wide guidelines for IT architectures and for prototyping new technologies and software products. He has fresh experience on both industrial and academic computer science research. Before joining BMW Group, he worked as an IT manager in the German software industry, and before that, he was involved in computer science research in the US. His research in the US focused on XML view maintenance, database updates, and XML query processing. He is one of the inventors of XMill, the first XML compressor. This work received the best paper award in ACM SIGMOD 2000. He also published various theoretical papers regarding view maintenance and updates in object-oriented and XML databases.