Conceptual Integration: Application to Rebuilding of Information Systems

Abstract

The notion of Integration is a fundamental subject of research as well as an ongoing challenge in many fields of engineering. In the context of Information Systems, integration refers to assimilating any two or more components of an information system for the purpose of making them function as one system. Today, the integration of information systems has become a necessity because, over time, big companies have developed mostly separate information systems for the automation of separate activities. Consequently, many current systems are fragmented and complex. This fragmentation has led to an array of problems and widespread inefficiency, along with an urgent need for change. This paper, while concerned with the general topic of integration, focuses on information system integration. The paper proposes a new approach to creating a basic framework and, without loss of generality, concentrates on diagrammatic representation of an information system. The underlying thesis is that a key obstacle in this context is lack of a framework as a base for unification and coherence of subsystems to produce an integrated system. The proposed conceptual representation is grounded on flows, thus guaranteeing continuity of visualized descriptions. The proposed diagrammatic methodology is applied to a case study. The resulting unified description is shown to be a viable foundation for information system integration