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survey method is discussed, the results from the
survey are shown and finally the results, conclusions
and further research are discussed.
2 RESEARCH GOAL
AND APPROACH
Every information system in an organization has its
own basic assumptions and technical basis. Also
every system will support different business
processes and therefore have a different purpose.
Therefore integration of information systems within
an organization, with each having their own specific
characteristics, will be a complex issue. Because the
organizational information systems differ in many
areas but nevertheless need to be integrated, it is
reasonable to assume that many factors will
influence the complexity of this integration process.
In the last decades ERP systems have become
important information systems which in many cases
act as the core or spine of the information systems
architecture in an organization (Sharif et al., 2005).
In most cases this core is surrounded by non ERP
systems that play a vital role within the organization.
These non ERP systems often support organizations
in providing extra value of services in relation to
their competitors or are specific to an organization,
and therefore cannot be replaced by an ERP module.
Since integration of ERP systems with other systems
is important, this research aims at obtaining the
factors which influence the complexity of the
integration process between ERP systems and non
ERP systems.
This was achieved by first performing an
extensive literature search for verified factors that
influence the complexity of the integration process
of ERP systems with non ERP systems. Although
several papers mention factors of influence, no
research has been found which shows a
comprehensive and confirmed list of such factors,
and equally important, shows which factors
influence most the complexity of the integration
process. Therefore a novel list of factors was
constructed from research literature in relevant
related areas. To be of value for further research and
use in ERP projects, such a list must be confirmed
by empirical research. In this research a first
investigation into the relevancy and completeness of
this novel list has been performed by retrieving the
opinion of a small group of experts. Experts seemed
a pragmatic empirical source for a first confirmation
of the retrieved factors, as came clear from literature
that there are many views on the subject and a
respectable number of factors should to be taken into
account.
The purpose of this empirical research was to
retrieve answers to the next questions:
1. Is the list retrieved from literature complete?
2. If not, what factors should be added to the list?
3. What is the relative importance of the factors on
this (appended) list?
3 INTEGRATION
In general, integration within the IT community is
the creation of links between information systems.
Because of existing different interpretations of the
word integration, this section will briefly discuss the
concept of integration as it is used in this research.
Integration is indicated by different expressions
(Themistocleous et al., 2001b, Themistocleous and
Irani, 2002): Enterprise Application Integration
(EAI), System Integration (SI), Value Chain
Integration (VCI), Supply Chain Integration (SCI),
Extended Business Integration (EBI), E-Business
Integration.
All these expressions point to integration within
an organization or integration across the borders of
an organization. The purposes of integration for an
organization are (Bhatt, 2000): reduce cost, improve
services and improve synergy effects. Reducing cost
is possible by efficiency improvement by integration
of processes and also by reducing the maintenance
cost of information systems. The improvement of
services results from a faster responsiveness to
changes on the market.
Gulledge (Gulledge, 2006) states that the term
integration is commonly used when discussing
enterprise applications. There are several definitions
of the term integration such as: ‘the interfacing of
systems together so they can pass information across
a complex technology landscape’ (Gulledge, 2006)
or ‘the extent to which data and application through
different communication networks can be shared and
accessed for organizational use’ (Bhatt, 2000).
Unfortunately these definitions are purely oriented
towards the technical aspects of integration and
leave business processes out of context.
Therefore a more comprehensive paradigm of
integration is: The integration of data resources,
the integration of application functions, and the
integration of business processes (Fan et al., 1999).
Because in the authors opinion,integration during
an ERP project is never just a technical matter,this
paper will employ the concept of integration as
proposed by Fan et al. (Fan et al.,1999)
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