Investigating EAI Adoption in LGAs: A Case Study Based Analysis

Literature indicates that Local Government Authorities (LGAs) have problems in meeting citizens’ demands. This may be attributed to the limitations of LGAs Information Technology (IT) infrastructures that are not integrated and do not allow them to deliver end-to-end integrated services. During the recent years, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has emerged to support organisations to integrate their IT infrastructures and deliver high quality of services. Despite the fact that many other types of organisations e.g. healthcare sector, multinational, Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and large organisations have adopted EAI, its application in the LGAs is limited. 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 of LGAs when taking decisions for EAI adoption. Although existing models related to EAI adoption have been reported in literature, the applicability and validity of these models is arguable and under research, as these models were proposed to support the decision-making process in other sector organisations and not in LGAs. The reason is that there are differences indicating that the factors that influence the decision-making process for EAI adoption differ from one type of organisation to the other depending among others on the nature, and the size (e.g. one set of factors is used to support EAI adoption in SMEs and another in large organisations). Similarly, there are differences among factors that are used in healthcare sector, multinational, SMEs and large organisations. Due to this reason, these factors may not be applicable in LGAs. 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 LGAs.