The Business of Systems Integration

摘要

Systems integration means, obviously enough, putting together components from different places to form a single correctly functioning system. This in turn means that the task straddles engineering design (of whole systems, as well as of components and their interfaces) and business organization and management. As components become commodities, or as suppliers become specialists in component design and manufacture, it becomes uneconomic for systems integrators to make such components in-house. The result is that both design and manufacture become distributed across supply chains. Engineering meets economics, and often politics as well. The book has three parts, covering respectively the history, the theory, and the economics of systems integration, with a handful of chapters on each topic.