4. Evaluation framework
This paper has highlighted that integration is an obstacle for most organisations, yet many technologies claim to overcome integration problems. However, it appears that there is no single integration technology (e.g. ebXML, .net) that support all integration problems. Therefore, permutations of integration technologies can support inter-organisational EAI. However, since there are many technologies available there is a resulting large number of permutations available to support integration efforts. The authors of this paper therefore propose a framework to support the selection of appropriate permutations of integration technologies when organisations seek to integrate one or more classifications of system types.
The proposed framework evaluates integration technologies and thus, highlighting possible permutations of integration technologies available. As explained in Section 3 application elements (data, objects, processes) are extracted from one application and converted through the three integration layers (transportation, translation and process automation) before reaching the target application. In addition, the systems that are integrated follow one or more permutations of system types described in Table 2. This indicates that application elements, integration layers and classifications of system types that are integrated in inter-organisational EAI should be adopted as evaluation criteria of the proposed framework. The explanation for this decision is that organisations need to clarify which technologies support the integration of their supply chain systems. In doing so, organisations need to investigate which technologies support the integration of application elements, permutations of system types and integration layers. The proposed evaluation framework is summarised in Table 3.