Evaluating and adopting application integration: the case of a multinational petroleum company

Many organisations use a diversity of information systems such as custom applications, e-business solutions and enterprise resource planning (ERP) to support their organisational and financial business processes. However, this diversity of heterogeneous and in many cases incompatible systems coupled with the absence of integrated enterprise architecture is considered a restricting factor in the automation of business processes and thus, cause a proliferation of integration problems. In attempting to overcome such issues, organisations are turning to a new category of integration software called application integration (AI), which results inflexible and manageable information systems (IS) and infrastructures. Application integration is achieved through the incorporation of functionality from disparate systems using a variety of integration technologies such as adapters and message brokers. In attempting to explore the area of AI, this paper discusses the adoption and the impact of application integration on organisations. In doing so, the case study of a multinational petroleum company that adopted an AI solution is presented. The case study presented in this paper shows that system design takes up to 60% of overall project time when integrating systems due to the reengineering of business processes. In addition, the majority of systems are phased out and the redundancy in functionality is significantly reduced.