Enterprise frameworks characteristics, criteria, and challenges

As information technology provides industry with means to identify new product and service opportunities, the increasing demand for these products and services places new demands on information technology. This cycle has created unprecedented requirements for integrated enterprise systems and applications, which are capable of modeling rapid changes in business policies, workflow and informational processing. A new breed of systems we refer to as object-oriented enterprise frameworks (OOEFs) has emerged to address these requirements. Research has studied trends in OOEF'S, guidelines for developing OOEFs and economic benefits of enterprise frameworks. OOEFs are designed to reduce the complexity and cost of enterprise systems and therefore have become strategic assets for organizations across all business sectors. Evidence of this is reflected in the recent entry of flexible and extensible products for commercially available, framework-based applications. Framework requirements are also defined.