X-Engineering (or Cross engineering)

BPR (Business Process Reengineering), the quite popular buzz word in early 90s focused on automation and transformation of an organization from operating a business in traditional ways to modern ways with the help of IT systems. Now that most of the organizations have done that job, the future is to look at innovating these business processes that are already mature with IT. X-Engineering (pronounced as Cross Engineering) aims at one such method.

Cross Engineering looks at business process improvements across the organizations involving their customers, vendors, business partners and any other mutually interested third party with an IT system. This process takes advantage of the fact that these participants have matured IT systems and can exchange information in understandable formats.

I believe cross engineering paves a big way for integrating loosely coupled systems. Which actually means, the recent buzz word - SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Already major application software vendors are moving in this direction and cross engineering has a good potential to support SOA.