Augmenting Smart Items With Business Intelligence

A Smart Item in the context of this paper is a non-human entity or section of the real world, augmented with IT functionality to support different kinds of information. Communication and discrimination are mandatory, while additional capabilities like computing, sensing and actuating are optional. Integrating Smart Items into the overall business processes by propagating data and services to these new edges of the IT landscape allows for better enterprise-wide integration, improved performance, scalability, and local decision making. This paper provides examples how under service-oriented architecture aspects a business process can be decomposed and partially propagated to lower layers, taking the full capabilities of Smart Items into consideration.