6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

Tridip Bardhan et al.
11, and by how each alternative relatively support different factors, as shown by the radar chart in Figure
12.
Table 3: Alternative performance with respect to criteria elements
Figure 10: Alternative final score and ranking
The case study results also showed that implementation cost was the major factor influencing the final
decision, scoring 12.8%, followed by implementation time with 12%. Scalability and security were
considered as the major technical factors with each scoring 7.8% and 7.6% respectively. In strategic
perspective, business agility, EI approach overall alignment with organization strategy and cooperation
with other business partners are leading factors, each scoring 6.8%, 5.3%and 5.3%, respectively.
Overall, factors deemed to enhance organization interoperability were well favored; although ranked
behind the factors related to approach implementation and security. These results are presented in Table
3, Figure 10 and Figure 11.
EAI approach scored average in almost every criterion considered. SOA approach was viewed as the
most outstanding approach as far as organization’s strategy is concerned, but performed relatively poor
in terms of cost related factors. ERP scored relatively well in technical related factors, especially on
issues related to security, maintainability and complexity. However, it was viewed as an expensive
approach. Finally, in-house application integration was favored in terms of cost related factors, although
viewed as an expensive approach to maintain. In addition, in-house application integration ranked quite
high in terms of organizational related factors such as acceptability and technical support/expertise
availability.
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