[The interview below is an abridged version of a broader conversation with James B. Porter, Jr. of DuPont. To listen to the full interview, and others in the Executive Q&A series, click here.] The global chemicals giant DuPont is on a mission to create enterprise interoperability across its many facilities. James B. Porter, Jr., the company's vice president of engineering and operations, is tasked with managing one of the core business processes that make up the manufacturer's "One DuPont" initiative. Porter says that while he and his colleagues have seen much progress, the journey is just beginning.

Q: How do you define the phrase enterprise interoperability, and what's driving it from a business perspective?
A: Enterprise interoperability has to do with having very efficient information and converting this information into a knowledge flow across all the core work processes of a business entity. When I'm talking about work processes, I'm talking about all of those things that are required to be done that enable a business to accomplish its intent or mission in the most business effective way... In DuPont engineering, we call our work process the facilities engineering process. It's only one of many work processes that comprise an enterprise. The enterprise has core processes like customer fulfillment, order to cash, and innovation, and these all need to be integrated. The whole idea around enterprise interoperability is that if you enter data that is pertinent to any of the other processes, it updates all of them everywhere in real time.

Q: So, you see it applied very broadly, from product design and creation right to shipment?
A: Exactly... On a net basis, our job, consistent with all laws, regulations, and our DuPont Core Values is to help the businesses make money and to make it as quickly as they can. One of the ways that we can support that best is to produce very little rework and to provide all the information that the businesses need in a timely, accurate, and up-to-date way. That includes everything from running plants to having spare parts lists to the ability to order electronically -- all of those things that enable them to be able to run and manage their plants in a way that they're always up when they want to be up and don't have to carry a nickel's more worth of working capital.

Q: So, you'd even see this going down to field devices?
A: Oh, without any question... it all ultimately has to be integrated... I can tell you that we have done the numbers and we are convinced that if we were fully interoperable, and were able to provide lifecycle data for a manufacturing facility of the type that we produce, that over a 15- to 20-year life of that facility there's a net present value of about 20%.

Q: What must be spent to get that 20%?
A: I would estimate it [at] no more than about a quarter of a percent of the total project cost for a new facility. Retrofits would be more expensive.

Q: What's the connection between the interoperability idea and the business transformation or business model changes that companies like DuPont are going through?
A: They are parts of the same strategy... The notion around One DuPont is to focus our engineering and operations processes in such a way that we can leverage existing facilities and resources, including information, across all the businesses making products at the plant. Then we extend this leveraging concept to plants across a region. Eventually you can extend the concept across the corporation. The real impact on operability occurs when we apply this concept to our core work processes. We have broken our company down into nine core work processes and asked ourselves: how do they run end to end and how can we simplify them? Then, how can we standardize them so that we have a One DuPont solution to the work that needs to be done? Finally, what is the best way to integrate them so that information flows between those work processes and forms an enterprise database? We are implementing SAP... We have begun to implement the maintenance and the project systems models. Our plan is to eventually tie all of the core work processes, which will have been simplified and then standardized, into our enterprise system support. Once you have embarked on an implementation like this, you can better appreciate the business need for interoperability, and then also begin to see how you extract the business value from it.

Q: How far along are you toward One DuPont?
A: We're pretty far along. We have established the notion of enterprise process owners... and now we are working to map all of our processes, simplify them, then work through the process to where we can standardize them and at the same time integrate them with the other core processes. So, I'd say we're about a year into the work, and I would hesitate to estimate a percent complete, because one of the things you learn when you do this kind of work is every time you work through one piece, you discover other things you can do to make things better. So, we are continuing to discover opportunities.

Q: What would you say the biggest challenges are on the technical side; and I assume there are also some on the cultural side?
A: I would say that the major challenges appear to be in the short term more on the technical side because of the lack of standardized databases and nomenclature... Within DuPont, we have overcome that cultural issue [because] people have been able to see the business value that can be gained from making these changes. And once those business value increases were credible [and] we were able to show credible data that people could relate to... the cultural issue just went away.

Q: What standards do you need to help your interoperability efforts?
A: Well, I think that the key standard for interoperability has to do with what things are called, or at least a way to translate that from one form to another. The whole idea around naming things -- you call it this, I call it that, somebody else calls it something different.

Q: You've also talked about an information-centric enterprise. What do you mean by that?
A: In our case, think about it as a project and a design activity. Someone has made a change somewhere, and it has updated everywhere, so that as opposed to you getting version 2, you're always getting the current version because you're information-centric. It's all this information flowing back and forth through the system in real time.

Q: Do you believe most manufacturers can become information-centric?
A: I think they can all embrace it... If you're a company like DuPont, and you have a number of facilities that you have built over the years, you can't do it all at once. You have to do it in a measured way. I mean, just imagine -- there's no way we could go in and start to make all these changes all at once. What I'm trying to push is [that] on all new investment we at least accept the fact that this is the direction that we should be moving...

Q: What milestones would you like to see on this road to enterprise interoperability?
A: More aggressive pursuit of and acceptance of things like ISO15926. [Also,] I think the ability of owners to get -- and to really start to use -- lifecycle data would be a development that I would consider a sign that enterprise interoperability is starting to work. I also think that the contracting community... needs to be in a position where they can stop having to spend a lot of extra money to be able to meet a lot of different owners' needs for specific types of information or for specific approaches... They're not able to become information-centric because of that lack of interoperability. So, as you see more of it taking place, you're going to see them being able to be more efficient and more effective, and hopefully we'll begin to see the total cost of all the project work continue to go down.

Q: It's almost like ecosystem interoperability.
A: That's not a bad way to think about it. In the end, this would be my summary of this whole thing: If you cannot give me a business reason why doing things differently creates more value for you or creates a competitive advantage, then we all ought to do it the same way. In the end... there is no sustainable competitive advantage in the system. There is sustainable competitive advantage in products and processes. There is sustainable competitive advantage in market location, and effective knowledge management.