A Framework for Assessment of Enterprise Integration Approaches and Technologies

Enterprise integration is the study of an organization, its business processes, and resources, understanding how they are related to each other and determining the enterprise structure so as to efficiently and effectively execute the enterprise goals. There are many separate research streams that have developed theories, approaches, and technologies for integrating the enterprise. There seems to be little sharing of concepts across disciplines or consensus on the topic of enterprise integration. Moreover, what is meant by the term ‘integration’ is poorly defined. In this article an enterprise integration framework is presented to bring together the divergent views of enterprise integration so that how they are related to each other can be understood. The enterprise integration framework defines five levels of the enterprise system to define the integration types encountered at each level. The five levels are organization, process, application, data, and network. The enterprise integration framework is used to analyse the many approaches used by different disciplines toward enterprise integration. The analysis identifies gaps for further research.