Justifying the decisions for EAI implementations: a validated proposition of influential factors

Abstract

Enterprise integration is considered to be of great strategic significance in the support of organisations to achieve a competitive advantage. Traditional approaches to integration such as electronic data interchange (EDI) have provided a wide range of benefits but have not managed to fully automate and integrate business processes and applications. In addressing many of the limitations of EDI to piece together disparate systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions introduced an alternative approach to integration. Although ERP systems overcome significant integration problems, they have failed to adequately support intra and inter‐organisational integration. There has been a great demand by organisations to overcome integration problems and become more competitive. In this respect, enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged to address intra and inter‐organisational integration in a more flexible and maintainable way. The normative literature remains limited regarding this emerging area and there is consequently a need for further research and contribution in identifying influential factors for EAI adoption. In addressing this relative void in the literature, this paper proposes a model for the justification and evaluation of EAI adoptions. The proposed model can be used by organisations as a tool for decision making when considering the adoption of EAI.

Benefits of Enterprise Integration: Review, Classification, and Suggestions for Future Research

“…Moreover, it offers the possibility to picture the relation between various benefits related to the different layers. The presented scheme differs essentially from both models proposed in [12] and [14]. By classifying the workflow of a typical integration scenario, the model proposed in [12] provides a layered view over EI activities (how it is performed) rather than the benefits of EI (what is achieved).…”

“…Benefits identified from the literature related to the information layer are data entry/processing automation and data quality improvements [14,21], enhanced data accessibility and reusability [3,9,14,17,21], and superior data standardization [3,14].…”

“…They argue that such automation minimizes the opportunity for human error, which in turn results in improvements in data accuracy. Moreover, according to [14], EI results in data with increased reliability, which is defined as a data quality dimension indicating whether the data can be relied on to convey the right information [24]. To indicate the significance of data quality improvements by enterprise integration, the authors in [14] discuss that such improvements supports the decision-making process, which in turn, improves performance and management of the organization.…”

“…The scheme proposed in this paper, however, aims to describe an organization as a layered framework of related independent activities which share common goals. The classification presented in [14] provides a classification model for the benefits of EI. On the other hand, the model limits its perspective to the point of view of an organization's senior management.…”

“…The process automation layer is responsible for routing the translated elements to target systems. Based on the classification of ERP benefits proposed by [13], Themistocleous [14] classifies the benefits of EI in five different types; organizational (e.g. more organized business processes), managerial (e.g.…”