Environment Based Design Approach to Integrating Enterprise Applications

Abstract

Enterprises tend to depend on various legacy applications in supporting their business strategies and in achieving their goals. 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 integrations (EAI) analyzed the problem, while others proposed solution models for the syntactic and semantic integration of business processes. 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 framework is proposed for EAI problems based on the EBD approach. A case study is also provided to show how the approach can be applied within a company to generate satisfactory EAI solutions with low cost, high efficiency, and enhanced scalability.