The media hype surrounding XML might lead the average person to believe that it is possible to create an XML interface for all of a company's documents, press a button and presto--instant business process integration. But the pioneers in this arena are finding that it's not that easy.

Integrating applications requires a considerable amount of effort even for simple things like sending an electronic purchase order. And it will only get more complex as companies try to perform more elaborate types of integration, such as tracking the flow of work between business partners or looking for new partners that can provide a particular service or capability.

Notes Sanjeev Varma, a Gartner Group analyst: "In the past, companies have integrated data. Now we are seeing the integration of applications. Above and beyond that, we will move to the integration of processes. The notion of process management is still at an early stage of acceptance. ERP and CRM applications all have some element of process integration or workflow that is specific to them. The larger challenge is to integrate those applications with other applications outside the enterprise."

Rita Knox, another Gartner Group analyst, explains that it will take some time and effort by IT managers to progress through these different levels of integration. The key limitation is that it can be tough to define standards for relatively simple things like car parts or banking records, and it will get even tougher as companies start looking at work processes and services.

"Broad adoption of a single data model is rare," Knox says. "Even if you get a group of people from the automotive or banking industry who say they want to define how they will deal with a transaction or how they will represent the specifics of a car, it's not so simple."

The problem is that different people in a supply chain have their own views of the universe, and they tend to look at products and their specifications differently. Companies might have various terms for the same item, such as calling a computer monitor a "display unit," a "TFT screen" or a "flat panel display." Manufacturers might have different levels of depth to describe an item. For example, a company data element might just include a name, address and URL on one system, while a trading partner might commonly use the name, address, revenues and SIC industry sector codes.

Integration Products Can Help

Integration products are one big part of the solution. Vendors such as Extricity, Vitria, Bluestone and webMethods are working to provide their customers with business process integration solutions that can work across company boundaries. For example, Sharp Electronics has deployed a B2B integration engine from Extricity that uses XML document interchange messaging to communicate with Sharp's trading partners.