Extending it infrastructures in the local government authorities through enterprise application integration

Local Government Authorities (LGAs) serve as agents to provide better and reliable services and information to their citizens. However, literature indicates that LGAs have problems in meeting citizens' demands. This may be attributed to the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure limitations in LGAs that are not integrated and do not allow them to deliver end-to-end integrated services. This paper examines a potentially important area of IT infrastructure integration in LGAs through Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). It has emerged to support organisations to integrate their IT infrastructures and deliver high quality of services. Despite the fact that several organisations in the private and public domain have adopted EAI, its application in LGAs is limited. This may illustrate that LGAs develop EAI solutions at a slower pace and they can be characterised as a laggard comparing to other sectors. The small number of EAI applications in LGAs has resulted in limited research in this area with many issues, like its adoption requiring further investigation. For this reason, LGAs need to realise the importance of EAI and speed up their decision-making process to adopt it. As a result, further research is required to support the decision-making process in LGAs when taking decisions for EAI adoption. Thus, the authors demonstrate that it is of high importance to investigate this area within LGAs and result in research that contributes towards successful EAI adoption. In doing so, allowing others to relate their experiences to those reported herein as well as to aid other LGAs on how they can integrate their disparate systems more efficiently and extend their IT infrastructures.