The impact of enterprise application integration on information system lifecycles

Information systems (IS) have become the organisational fabric for intra- and inter-organisational collaboration in business.As a result, there is mounting pressure from customers and suppliers for a direct move away from disparate systems operating inparallel towards a more common shared architecture. In part, this has been achieved through the emergence of new technologythat is being packaged into a portfolio of technologies known as enterprise application integration (EAI). Its emergence however,is presenting investment decision-makers charged with the evaluation of IS with an interesting challenge. The integration of ISin-line with the needs of the business is extending their identify and lifecycle, making it difficult to evaluate the full impact of thesystem as it has no definitive start and/or end. Indeed, the argument presented in this paper is that traditional life cycle models arechanging as a result of technologies that support their integration with other systems. In this paper, the need for a betterunderstanding of EAI and its impact on IS lifecycles are discussed and a classification framework proposed.