Justifying the Decisions for EAI Adoption in LGAs: A Validated Proposition of Factors, Adoption Lifecycle Phases, Mapping and Prioritisation of Factors

Local Government Authorities (LGAs) are responsible for providing reliable services and information to their citizens. However, literature indicates that LGAs have problems in meeting citizens´ demands. This may be attributed to the information technology (IT) infrastructure limitations in LGAs that are not integrated and do not allow them to deliver end-to-end integrated services. The reason is that legacy information systems (IS) are usually tailored to support specific business processes and functions and are difficult to integrate. This gives rise to a need for an integrated IT infrastructure that facilitates reuse of existing applications and flexibly implementing business processes. Enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged to address the intra- and inter-organisational integration in a more flexible and manageable way. Nevertheless, its application in LGAs is limited. Thus, 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 addressing the relative void, this paper proposes and validates a novel model for EAI adoption in LGAs and contributes to the body of knowledge by extending the literature. The proposed model can be used by LGAs as a tool for decision making while adopting EAI.