Specifics of Enterprise Integration - Literature review Example

Literature Review of Enterprise Integration

The section provides a critical summary of selected literature resources published on the topic under study. The study of enterprise integration will give a critical review of selected credible sources providing the overview and better understanding of the survey topic, which is essential for the research. The review will aim at preventing the possible duplication of the research through given updated information to the researchers in the field of study. The organization of this review into sections will enhance the reorganization of the literary facts found in the selected sources. Moreover, the review will give more answers to the research questions given in the earlier section. The integration of enterprise has resulted into well-informed decision making in business thus improving its productivity.

Recently, the technological advancements have contributed an increased interest in the integration of enterprises that provides solutions to the challenges facing most businesses. Because of increase in the complexity of the enterprise management, the business systems have become inflexible and fragile. For instance, the legacy applications complicate the interconnectivity across the companies hence offering inaccurate information (Grandry, Feltus & Dubois, 2013, p.117). Enterprise integration methods such as API and SaaS integration platforms help to retain agility of a business making it easy to unify applications, services, systems and databases across an enterprise. However, various enterprises have received integration processes as a way to make the business stay connected, innovative and competitive, thereby providing the insight for making better decisions (Subashini & Kavitha, 2011, p.11).

In addition, integration of enterprise improves the connectivity throughout the company by reducing communication problems across the differing systems enable everyone to access the information at their convenience. Dinsmore and Rocha (2012, p. 45) propose that the integration of enterprise assists in the coordination of the business processes through the automation of the operations hence improving business productivity. They also suggest that business integration will provide real- time updates and provides the right information to the users whenever they need it regardless of the system they are using. Scheer (2012, p.24) alleges that integration process determines the ability to respond rapidly to new business and reduces cycle time and cost of coordination to improve the productivity. Many approaches aim to integrate enterprises including MuleSoft, which is an enterprise service bus that wills helps to solve new business challenges. Enterprise integration vendors claim that point-to-point integration would save a lot of money and time for the business communication processes and data management (Gmelch, 2012, p, 118).

Additionally, integration through API connectivity in the business would assist in the synchronization of data between on-premises and cloud application. MuleSoft offers many integration tools such as service mediation that would divide the logics of business from message formats and protocols (Panetto & Cecil, 2013, p.5). Message routing and data transformation are additional tools that will transform data to and from any format virtually hence giving an option for encrypting, encoding, and compressing messages to ensure security. Other integration applications such as DataWeave will provide solid integration capabilities and end-to-end protection from unwanted threats, unauthorized access and undesired exposure of sensitive data (Strauch et al., 2012, p.388).

Yin (2013, p. 271) points out that customer’s partnership with the organization’s management would lead to more stable integration process implementation. Data handling software such as InfoSphere data management platform containing key components such as metadata management, data profiling, transform, load, and extract will assist in the integration processes of complex data (Hsu, 2012, p. 33). Different integration vendors have argued that bus and hub patterns will enable secure connection and message delivery hence bringing down the support cost and making the services intact and reliable. Vernadat and Ladet (2013, p.1) contrast enterprises integration with system interoperability where enterprise integration facilitates the information, the material flow and control across the organization through the connection of all possible functions and functional elements (Mihindukulasooriya, García-Castro & Esteban-Gutiérrez, 2013, p.150).

Previous studies highlight the various challenges facing the enterprise integration including the complexity of data and cost of starting the integration applications (Zikopoulos et al., 2012, p.51). For example, Kosanke & Nell (2012, p.432) illustrates the possible ways of business integration and decision-making improvement skills thereby enhancing the interconnection between the people in the business operation. The duo highlights the tools and frameworks that will help the enterprise in achieving its processes and systems’ systematic integration hence providing a semantic foundation for its integration. The automation of the models can also provide specific solutions to the business integration challenges. Bernus & Nemes (2013, p. 38) provide the engineering projects which they claim will give insights into distinct team’s collaboration structures and reveals the behavior and the performance of such structures in enhancing data manipulations in large operations. Besides, the authors allege that message-oriented integration patterns will provide the solutions to the problems of latency and unreliability of information. However, most vendors and advisors of integration offer the best practices and methodologies as well as guidelines and principles, which will try to solve frequently experienced integration challenges. Such methods include Apache Camel, Rabbit MQ, and Oracle Service Bus, which would ease the integration solutions hence making the project achieve its objectives (Li, Xu & Wang, 2012, p. 170).

However, the revolutionary nature of technology promises the business organizations of promising technological advancements to address the issue of enterprise integration (Xu, 2012, p.76). The integration application advancements will provide better decision-making techniques aiming at improving the productivity of the business. However, quantitative data collection techniques that will help to provide answers to the study topic include administering questionnaire and conduction of interview from relevant sources (Davino & Fabbris, 2012, p.89). For instance, different researchers suggest that the robust size of the data that large companies handle needs complex and improved data integration software (Hohpe & Woolf, 2014, p.67).

Integration patterns such as object-oriented with the application of the legacy system will facilitate improved data handling capacity and information transfer in an enterprise hence productivity improvement (Panetto, Jardim-Goncalves & Molina, 2012, p.288). From the findings of the previous data collected, strategic integration designs will provide solutions to improved data handling by the various business firms. Low possibility of conveying inaccurate messages and information among the customers and the firm system users would translate to lower cost of maintenance. The reduced maintenance cost will enterprise labor expenditures and increase the production and revenue rates at a short period. The review will provide the confidentiality issues regarding the study, which includes the quantitative study design that brings forth high quality and objective research findings regarding the integration strategies of an enterprise.

Despite the cost of management of some sophisticated integration application software, integration providers and vendors have advocated for other reliable and cheap methodologies such as middleware platforms, which is less complicated. There are claims that the platform will allow a particular database to access other databases within the enterprise thereby enhancing complete integration of mixed sources of data (Vallejo, Romero&Molina, 2012, p.1501). Other software includes the iWay Software, which most vendors claims will speeds up the business integration through getting rid of custom integration code and replacing it with batch integration. iWay gives standard connections to sources of data hence assisting an organization to adapt to different sophisticated technologies such as IBM’s WebsphereTM, XML and JavaTM. Various researchers state that integration of enterprise will give the solutions for transfer of files between departments, messaging, shared database and the remote procedure invocation hence enabling real-time communication (Siriwardena, 2013, p.93). However, the combination of front-end and iWay Software in WebFOCUS Business Intelligence gives an unusual vendor solution will allow for real-time dispatch of messages and information to everyone in an extended business enterprise. Besides, integration of enterprise will provide access to the current information assets especially the relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses and legacy (Rabl et al., 2012, p.201).

Scheer (2012, p.22) points out that integration of business processes and application would allow for the secure, reliable and efficient data transfer between multiple enterprise applications. Integration of business applications and systems will facilitate and increase customer relationship management and the order processing system, which will later enhance the coordination of the business. Rolstadas & Andersen (2012, p. 578) propose that the business integration provides solutions to business customs for software and other business integration technology which will, in turn, provide cyber security at different levels. The flexibility, scalability, and openness of data center solutions help to collaborate capabilities, which will improve the efficiency of better business results. In addition, the integration processes such as business intelligence will assists in the enterprise’s decision making thereby reducing overall costs, enhancing customer satisfaction and raising net revenues (Chaikin&Hobbs, 2011, p.108).

Despite the integration of enterprises, there are still several challenges that will hinder the integration process such as the limited amount of control the integration developers have over the participating applications. For instance, the rigidity of legacy state of the systems and the applications for integration solution to the changing revolution advancements make it difficult to implement the integration techniques. Although, few standards of an establishment of integration domains such as XML, XSL, and Web Services exist, the lack of interoperability between the standards compliant products will hindering the integration process (Van Sinderen, 2012, p. 44). The whole process of integration involves the different integration channels such as information portal, data replication, shared business functions, service-oriented architectures, and distributed business process and business-to-business integration (Angelo et al., 2011, p.809).

In enterprise integration, the information portal involves several users’ accessing more than one system to perform a specific business function, which will, therefore, prevent a single user from accessing multiple system information. Data replication in integration, on the other hand, is a case where many users access the same data, for example in shipping system, accounting system, and the billing system. Data replication will allow storage of many information related to the customers hence making it easy to manage the business operations. Apparently, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) usually offers tools for making an external calling service thereby enhancing performance consideration and coordination. Moreover, the integration providers also advocate for the modeling of the existing data to achieve an integrated view using specific query processing tools.

Conclusion

The above research findings and integrational process promises more research questions to advance the previous findings. Eventually, many business enterprises have developed and tested the integration methods and applications against certain hypothesis that have proved positive. Additionally, other integration vendors have positively received the research advances hence promised to develop better integration systems and applications because of the increasing complexity of the data and communication process. Integration of enterprise components such as the plans, tools, and methods will target to modernize, consolidate and coordinate computer applications in an enterprise with a goal of increasing its productivity at a lower cost. Moreover, the integration techniques such as the exploitation of internets, e-commerce, extranet and other new technologies will focus on the devising ways to reuse the existing methods effectively. The SaaS BI and the Cloud BI (Business Intelligence) acts as third party hosting service providers where the users access all the features and functionality of the Cloud BI through a web (Bourimi et al, 2012, p.51).

The application of middleware will intermediate between two separate and already existing programs, providing access to certain program databases like SQLServer to access other databases like Oracle without application of the custom code. IWay Software as well will provide easy real-time information to employees, managers, partners and customers through The Web, e-mail, and mobile devices. Business integration enhances the interconnection of the enterprise information system, which is the foundation of the transformation of the business economy (Chen, Chiang&Storey, 2012, p.354). Furthermore, the growth of the organizations to more complex and sophisticated data management practices drives the firms into the application of modern technologies to provide solutions to the current business trends. Hence, upon implementing such integration techniques, the business will be in the better position to survive, evolve and thrive these competitive markets.