Enterprise Applications Integration Using Environment Based Design (EBD)

Abstract

Organizations tend to depend on their various legacy applications in supporting their business strategies and in achieving goals. The existing legacy applications are often from different vendors. In order for an enterprise to be efficient and cost-effective, their legacy applications should be seamlessly integrated within and beyond the enterprise. Some research work in Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) technologies analyzed the problem from the technical point of view while others proposed models for business processes integration such as syntactic and semantic integration. In this paper the EAI is considered as a design problem and is analyzed from design point of view. Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology is applied to handle the integration problem by analyzing and clarifying the design requirements to generate appropriate solutions. A case study is provided to show how the EBD can be applied within a company to generate satisfactory EAI solutions with low cost, efficiency and scalability enhancement.