James G. Nell
Encyclopedia
James G. Nell (1938) is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 engineer
Engineer
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

, who was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
National Institute of Standards and Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology , known between 1901 and 1988 as the National Bureau of Standards , is a measurement standards laboratory, otherwise known as a National Metrological Institute , which is a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce...

 (NIST), known for his work on Enterprise integration
Enterprise integration
Enterprise integration is a technical field of Enterprise Architecture, which focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments....

.

Biography

Jim Nell received his BSEE from Drexel University
Drexel University
Drexel University is a private research university with the main campus located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. It was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a noted financier and philanthropist. Drexel offers 70 full-time undergraduate programs and accelerated degrees...

 and his MBA from Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University, often referred to as Bowling Green or BGSU, is a public, coeducational research university located in Bowling Green, Ohio, United States. The institution was granted a charter in 1910 by the State of Ohio as part of the Lowry Bill, which also established Kent State...

.

From 1961 until 1993 he worked at Westinghouse in various assignments in systems engineering
Systems engineering
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed over the life cycle of the project. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic control of machinery become more...

, international marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...

, program management
Program management
Program management or programme management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance...

, and strategic planning
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. In order to determine the direction of the organization, it is necessary to understand its current position and the possible avenues...

 and finally Manager of Information Technology Programs at the Manufacturing Systems and Technology Center of Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Columbia, Maryland. From 1993 to 2000 at NIST he was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project.

Formerly he was active in the TC 184 SC4 work to develop product- and process-data representation serving as the US expert to the SC4 Strategic Planning Advisory Group. For the IGES
IGES
The Initial Graphics Exchange Specification is a file format which defines a vendor neutral data format that allows the digital exchange of information among Computer-aided design systems....

/PDES
Process Development Execution System
A Process Development Execution System is a system which is used by companies to perform development activities for high-tech manufacturing processes. A PDES is similar to a Manufacturing Execution Systems in several ways...

 Organization, he was Chairman of the Steering Committee. He was the original chair of the Evolving Standards Focus Group of the Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum at the Iacocca Institute, and a founding participant of the ANSI
Ansi
Ansi is a village in Kaarma Parish, Saare County, on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia....

 Organization for Harmonization of Product Data Standards. As a member of the National Initiative for Product Data Exchange staff, he was the architect of the NIPDE Electronic Library, an early application of the World-Wide Web.

Work

Nell has concentrated on product-information representation, enterprise integration, and standards that apply to information representation and enterprise integration.

GERAM

Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology
Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology
Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology is a generalised Enterprise Architecture framework for enterprise integration and business process engineering. It identifies the set of components recommended for use in enterprise engineering.This framework is developed in the 1990s...

 (GERAM) is a generalised Enterprise Architecture framework for enterprise integration and business process engineering. It identifies the set of components recommended for use in enterprise engineering
Enterprise engineering
Enterprise engineering is a subdiscipline of systems engineering, which applies the knowledge and methods of systems engineering to the design of businesses. The discipline examines each aspect of the enterprise, including business processes, information flows, and organizational structure...

.

This framework was developed in the 1990s by an IFAC
International Federation of Automatic Control
The International Federation of Automatic Control , founded in September 1957, is a multinational federation of , each one representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in its own country.The aim of the Federation is to promote the science and technology of...

/IFIP Task Force on Architectures
Enterprise architecture
An enterprise architecture is a rigorous description of the structure of an enterprise, which comprises enterprise components , the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships between them...

 for Enterprise Integration
Enterprise integration
Enterprise integration is a technical field of Enterprise Architecture, which focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments....

. Starting from the evaluation of existing enterprise integration architectures the Task Force has developed an overall definition of a generalised architecture. This proposed framework was labelled as GERAM for "Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology".

ISO TC184 SC5 WG1

Jim Nell has been Convener of ISO TC184 SC5 WG1, Industrial Automation Systems and Integration, Architecture, Communications, and Integration Frameworks, Modeling and Architecture. He is a member of the US delegation to SC5, and a member of the US technical-advisory groups to TC184 and SC5.

Enterprise integration

Enterprise integration has been discussed since the early days of computers in industry and especially in the manufacturing industry with Computer Integrated Manufacturing
Computer Integrated Manufacturing
Computer-integrated manufacturing is the manufacturing approach of using computers to control the entire production process. This integration allows individual processes to exchange information with each other and initiate actions...

 (CIM) as the acronym for operations integration. In spite of the different understandings of the scope of integration in CIM it has always stood for information integration
Information integration
Information integration is the merging of information from disparate sources with differing conceptual, contextual and typographical representations. It is used in data mining and consolidation of data from unstructured or semi-structured resources...

 across at least parts of the enterprise. Information integration essentially consists of providing the right information, at the right place, at the right time.

The state of the art in enterprise engineering
Enterprise engineering
Enterprise engineering is a subdiscipline of systems engineering, which applies the knowledge and methods of systems engineering to the design of businesses. The discipline examines each aspect of the enterprise, including business processes, information flows, and organizational structure...

 and integration in the 1990s according to Nell and Kosanke (1997) has been rather confusing. On one hand it claims to provide solutions for many of the issues identified in enterprise integration. On the other hand the solutions seem to compete with each other, use conflicting terminology and do not provide any clues on their relations to solutions on other issues. Workflow modelling, business-process modelling, business-process re-engineering (BPR), and concurrent engineering all aim toward identifying and providing the information needed in the enterprise operation. In addition, numerous integrating-platforms concepts are promoted with only marginal or no recognition or support of information identification. Tools claiming to support enterprise modelling exist in very large numbers, but the support is rather marginal, especially if models are to be used by the end user, for instance, in decision support.

The understanding and application of enterprise-engineering and enterprise-integration technologies especially in the end-user community is hampered by the current confusion in solutions and terminology as well as by the lack of sufficient enterprise-integration technologies and their insufficient business justification. The need for enterprise-engineering and enterprise-integration technology is intensifying through the increasing emphasis on agile operation in globally extended or virtual enterprises.

Manufacturing Enterprise Integration

At NIST Jim Nell was the principal investigator of Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project. This project aimed to improve business process interoperability
Business process interoperability
Business process interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse business processes to work together, to so called "inter-operate"....

by developing standards to allow software applications to share information better.

Publications

Nell has published numerous scientific and professional papers as well as several books. A selection:
  • 1997. Enterprise engineering and integration : building international consensus : proceedings of ICEIMT ʾ97, International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology, Torino, Italy, October 28-30, 1997. Edited with Kurt Kosanke. Springer.
  • 2002. Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus (IFIP International Federation for Information Processing). Edited with Kurt Kosanke, Roland Jochem, and Angel Ortiz Bas


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