Sustainable Enterprise Architecture with EAI - An Empirical Study

Today large companies often have to cope with complex and heterogeneous IT infrastructures. The main target of IT architects being responsible for those architectures is to align IT to business needs at the lowest costs possible. A recent approach to this issue is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). EAI provides a platform for business process oriented system integration. The aim of EAI is to consolidate the number of point to point interface of integrated applications in a rather centralized hub and spoke architecture. In contrast to former middleware approaches EAI provides integration not only on a technical level but on a business process level too. According to this we consider EAI as an architectural element affecting IT as well as organizational issues. Thus EAI again raises the question for interdependencies between IT and organization. Our study examines how EAI is used in large-scale companies and which effects it has on the organizational architecture of those companies. The results illustrate that EAI is a major component in complex IT infrastructures which has a significant influence on business processes. But the study also shows that there is a considerable gap between the importance of EAI in enterprise architecture and the way it is used in companies today. Eventually this article points out what has to be done to come closer to what we call an internally sustainable enterprise architecture which takes technological as well as organizational aspects into consideration.