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Designing enterprise integration solutions: effectively

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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

The design of large and complex enterprise integration solutions is a difficult task. It can require solutions that are unique because of constraints from the current set of legacy applications. Design knowledge for enterprise integration solutions is, therefore, difficult to articulate and reuse. In particular, the nature and form of knowledge for conceptual design of integration solutions is difficult to pin down. In this paper, we investigate whether design knowledge for enterprise integration in the form of patterns can be reused to develop systems integration solutions, and whether such reuse leads to more effective design outcomes. The research follows design science guidelines in which we describe a research artifact, and evaluate it to assess whether it meets the intended goals. The results indicate that approaches to facilitate reuse of conceptual design knowledge are feasible in the domain of enterprise integration, and that such reuse does, in fact, lead to more effective design solutions.

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Notes

  1. Other, similar patterns of interactions have been proposed elsewhere such as the message exchange patterns (WSDL-Adjuncts, 2007) and service interaction patterns (Barros et al., 2005).

  2. For the purpose of this presentation, we will simply indicate that the fragment was identified by examining a change in actors.

  3. Other possibilities for representing the action types (e.g., Request for action and Inform) may suggest different mappings against the EI Patterns. For the purpose of this presentation, we have focused on one possible interpretation. Multiple interpretations are feasible because of the inherent nature of design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of North Florida, U.S.A.

    Karthikeyan Umapathy

  2. College of IST, Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.

    Sandeep Purao

  3. Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.

    Russell R Barton

Authors
  1. Karthikeyan Umapathy
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  2. Sandeep Purao
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  3. Russell R Barton
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Correspondence to Karthikeyan Umapathy.

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Umapathy, K., Purao, S. & Barton, R. Designing enterprise integration solutions: effectively. Eur J Inf Syst 17, 518–527 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2008.39

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