Horizontal and vertical integration of organizational IT systems

Legacy information systems are usually tailored to support particular business functions, such as payroll or purchasing, and are as a consequence usually difficult to integrate. However, companies of today strive to streamline their business processes (intra- as well as inter-organizational). This gives rise to a strong need for much better integration of systems (existing as well as new in-house developed systems or packaged ERP solutions) across functional boundaries and in line with the business processes. This paper surveys and discusses methods and technique to achieve such horizontal integration as well as vertical integration between different operational and management levels in an organization.