Investigating Enterprise Application Integration Adoption in the Local Government Authorities

Abstract

Literature indicates that Local Government Authorities (LGAs) have problems in meeting citizens’ demands. This may be attributed to the limitations of LGAs Information Technology (IT) infrastructures that are not integrated and do not deliver end-to-end integrated services. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has emerged to support organizations to integrate their IT infrastructures and deliver a high quality of services. Despite the fact that many other private and public (healthcare) organizations have adopted EAI, its application in LGAs is limited. For this reason, LGAs need to realise the importance of EAI and speed up their decision-making process to adopt it. Thus, further research is required to support the decision-making process in LGAs for EAI adoption. The applicability and validity of the existing EAI adoption models in LGAs is arguable and under research, as these models were proposed to support the decision-making process in other sectors and not in LGAs. The reason is that there are differences indicating that the factors that influence the decision-making process for EAI adoption differ from one type of organization to the other, depending among others on the nature, and the size (e.g. one set of factors is used to support EAI adoption in SMEs and another in large organizations). Therefore, the authors demonstrate that it is of high importance to investigate this area within LGAs and result in research that contributes towards successful EAI adoption in LGAs.