Information Systems Architectures and Systems Integration: an empirical study of French Small to medium Enterprises

SMEs are a primary driver of economic growth and in the European Union. Yet relatively little is known about how these organizations use information system resources to achieve interoperability and integration. This paper, based on a cross-sectional empirical study of IS architectural integration within 143 small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in France, reports findings on how SME organize and architect to achieve IS integration and/or interoperability. This research provides an empirically derived taxonomy of enterprise architectural variants of the types often described in the literature for large firms. This study finds indications that for SMEs the immediate goal of interoperability prevailed over a fuller and more formal system integration. Comparing the three IT architectures and IS systems integration types, the most common means for approaching any form of integration is via the construction of software bridges and interfaces. The paper makes a contribution to research method by explaining how a European analysis tool, SPAD, helps identify clusters and thus help confirm that SMEs are in different class of organization types with reference to IT architectures and IS integration, and that these firms do things differently than large firms, at least in France.