Evaluating Application Integration: An Exploratory Case Study

AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) (Association for Information Systems)Published 1 January 2001Open access

Marinos Tehmistocleous, Zahir Irani

Citations14

TL;DR

The case study of a multinational group that is adopting an integrated infrastructure based on AI shows that the organisation has changed its business strategy and structure in order to achieve integration.

Abstract

Application Integration is a category of integration software resulting in the development of flexible, and maintainable information systems. It is achieved through the incorporation of functionality from a diversity of systems, such as legacy systems and Enterprise Resource Planning. Application integration is a new research area and therefore, scientific research and literature around it is limited. In attempting to enrich AI literature and to support theory building, the authors of this paper present the case study of a multinational group that is adopting an integrated infrastructure based on AI. The organisation been studied, adopted an application integration solution to overcome existing organisational and operating problems. The study presented in this paper, shows that the organisation has changed its business strategy and structure in order to achieve integration. In doing so, it faced resistance from partners and its subsidiaries. In addition, the organisation has to overcome employees resistance to change and invested a lot of money to educate them and to change their culture. Moreover, the IT infrastructure was restructured to piece together organisations applications and systems were redesigned or phased out in order to meet integration requirements.

Keywords

Business, Management and Accounting

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