Evaluating e-Government infrastructure through enterprise application integration (EAI)

During the past few years public organisations have adopted CRM applications to improve both their services and relationships with their citizens. The application of CRM is beneficial for local government authorities (LGAs) as it results in improvements in information sharing and cost reduction. Recently, many LGAs have attempted to link together their e-Gov and CRM applications to deliver better services. Nonetheless, public organisations have realised that they can gain significant advantages when they integrate their CRM and e-Gov IS with their disparate back-office solutions. Thus, they are seeking ways to integrate their applications and IT infrastructures. Kamal, Themistocleous and Morabito suggest that public organisations can focus on integration technologies like Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to incorporate their systems and processes, and thus, achieve their goals. In this chapter, they present and analyze one case study that focuses on the development of integrated e-Gov and IT infrastructures in an LGA. The case organisation has initially incorporated its e-Gov-IS with CRM to improve its services. Such interconnectivity has resulted in a partial integration solution, as there was no linkage between the front- (CRM, e-Gov) and back-office systems. Thus, the organisation collaborated with its software supplier to apply an EAI solution and piece together its IS. The extracted results may seem less as they are based on one pilot case study. In addition, all factors reported by Kamal and Themistocleous were not analyzed in this one case study. However, it is considered a starting point in comparing and analyzing EAI adoption factors when analyzing further case studies within LGAs.