An assessment of facilitators and inhibitors for the adoption of enterprise application integration technology : An empirical study

Purpose – Enterprise application integration (EAI) aims to integrate various enterprise applications, such as legacy systems, enterprise resource planning systems, and best‐of‐breed business applications, to aid in promoting organizational goals. EAI is a relatively new area of concern for researchers and practitioners and research on its adoption by organizations remain to be examined. Design/methodology/approach – This paper extends prior research by providing a systematic examination of both generic and specific dimensions of facilitators and inhibitors for the adoption of EAI technology. A rigorous validation of these factors was established. A case study was conducted to refine the developed instrument. Findings – The results indicate that EAI adoption is facilitated by generic as well as specific factors to this technology. Research limitations/implications – Several limitations of the study need to be mentioned at this stage. First, the research design of this study has incorporated only one site to examine and enrich the list of facilitators and inhibitors of EAI adoption. It is not known whether these results would apply to other organizations, other technologies and whether the project size has some influence on the results. More empirical work is needed to increment the developed instrument. The results of this study have three specific implications for future research. First, this study can be replicated to examine the effect of these facilitators on EAI project performance. Second, more research can be conducted to validate dimensions identified in this study. A survey may strengthen the validation process of the developed instrument and the structure of the dimensions and constructs used. Finally, the results of this study and the developed instrument can be applied on other technologies such as web services, etc. Practical implications – The paper extends King and Teo's list to include EAI‐specific factors. Second, it validates the instrument through the card sorting procedure and a case study. The identified dimensions can be used in future research on EAI adoption. The results have also important managerial implications. Managers who are planning to adopt EAI technology can use the developed instrument to assess systematically the facilitators and inhibitors of this technology in their organizational context. Originality/value – This study extends and accumulates on Teo's framework for inhibitors and facilitators of IT adoption in the EAI context.