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Throughout the last few decades, researchers have developed standard usability questionnaires to evaluate usability and present a single score that represents a product's overall level of ease of use. One of the most notable questionnaires is the System Usability Scale (SUS) (Sauro & Lewis, 2009). However, since the SUS was introduced in 1986, products and services have not only undergone monumental advancements in technology, but Human-Computer Interaction and user experience research practices have matured. These changes are also true in the enterprise space. In this paper, we present preliminary evidence concerning the construct validity of a new usability questionnaire with three advantages for enterprise applications over the original 10-item SUS questionnaire. The Enterprise System Usability Scale (ESUS) offers better measurement of usability for technical products/services, reduced questionnaire items, and alignment with enterprise environments. Results indicate that the ESUS exhibits a similarly strong correlation with satisfaction as the SUS and is strongly correlated with SUS for enterprise and enterprise data products/services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores upgrading Human Resources (HR) enterprise applications by integrating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) systems to boost efficiency and compliance. It covers challenges with outdated HR systems, the benefits of ERP and GRC integration, and key considerations for data migration, change management, and security during the upgrade process.

Integrating third-party and legacy systems has become a critical necessity for companies, driven by the need to exchange information with various entities such as banks, suppliers, customers, and partners. Ensuring data integrity, keeping integrations up-to-date, reducing transaction risks, and preventing data loss are all vital aspects of this complex task. Achieving success in this endeavor, which involves both technological and business challenges, necessitates the implementation of a well-suited architecture. This article introduces an architecture known as the Dynamic Canonical Data Model through Agnostic Messages. The proposal addresses the integration of loosely coupled software units, mainly when dealing with internal and external data integration. To illustrate the architecture's components, a case study from the Mexican Logistics Company Paquetexpress is presented. This organization manages integrations across several platforms, including SalesForce and Oracle ERP, with clients like Amazon, Mercado Libre, Grainger, and Afull. Each of these incurs costs ranging from USD 30,000 to USD 36,000, with consultants from firms such as Quanam, K&F, TSOL, and TekSi playing a crucial role in their execution. This consumes much time, making maintenance costs considerably high when clients request data transmission or type changes, particularly when utilizing tools like Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) or Oracle Service Bus (OSB). The article provides insights into the architecture's design and implementation in a real-world scenario within the delivery company. The proposed architecture significantly reduces integration and maintenance times and costs while maximizing scalability and encouraging the reuse of components. The source code for this implementation has been registered in the National Registry of Copyrights in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in the modern era of data explosion and globalisation. Application here refers to software, which is in essence data system, and data refers to both information and knowledge (data serves as a vehicle for information as well as knowledge). The salient features of the model are: (1) separation of business functions from applications and enterprises, (2) three-layer architecture of the model (conceptual or semantic level, external or application level, internal or realisation level), and (3) integration of structured, semi-structured and non-structured data. To our best knowledge, the existing model or solution to EAI does not hold all the three features. A case study is presented to illustrate how the model works. The model can be used by an individual enterprise or a group of enterprises that form a network, e.g., a holistic supply chain network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a memorial for two individuals, John Nystuen and Bob Austin, who were original board members of Solstice. John Nystuen was a professor of geography at the University of Michigan and made significant contributions to the field. He was known for his mentoring and research in quantitative geography. Bob Austin was a geographer and GIS expert who worked in academia and the private sector. He was passionate about sharing his knowledge and advancing technological opportunities. Both individuals had a love for nature, travel, and learning. They will be remembered for their contributions and cherished by their loved ones. [Extracted from the article]

Enterprise Application Integration deals with the problem of connecting heterogeneous applications, and is the centerpiece of current on-premise, cloud and device integration scenarios. For integration scenarios, structurally correct composition of patterns into processes and improvements of integration processes are crucial. In order to achieve this, we formalize compositions of integration patterns based on their characteristics, and describe optimization strategies that help to reduce the model complexity, and improve the process execution efficiency using design time techniques. Using the formalism of timed DB-nets – a refinement of Petri nets – we model integration logic features such as control- and data flow, transactional data storage, compensation and exception handling, and time aspects that are present in reoccurring solutions as separate integration patterns. We then propose a realization of optimization strategies using graph rewriting, and prove that the optimizations we consider preserve both structural and functional correctness. We evaluate the improvements on a real-world catalog of pattern compositions, containing over 900 integration processes, and illustrate the correctness properties in case studies based on two of these processes. • Description of the responsible composition and optimization (ReCO) process. • Specification of a structural correctness enforcing representation of processes. • Definition of execution semantics of processes as open timed db-nets. • Interpretation procedure of integration pattern graphs as open timed db-nets. • Optimization realizations, proves of their correctness, and provided prototypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion of enterprise systems offered by firms such as SAP and Oracle. It is noted that these computerized systems are large and complex, with costs in the millions of dollars. Many firms expect that they will be able to integrate these systems into their businesses more rapidly than is actually possible. Information from studies of enterprise system adoption by eight different firms on three different continents is presented. It is said that the companies eventually were very pleased with the results, but it took years for their employees and executives to achieve mastery of these enterprise systems.

Manufacturing enterprise today has become a matter of effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge-based engineering. Several new manufacturing paradigms such as virtual enterprise (or extended enterprise) and mass customization have resulted in a highly distributed and autonomous manufacturing system. On the one hand, this will increase the competitiveness of a firm in terms of quickly meeting dynamic changes in the market; on the other hand, this will also increase the difficulty of integrating different information and knowledge systems residing in each member firm. This integration is also called enterprise application integration (EAI) (here the term application means information systems or software systems for supporting manufacturing or service activities). The methodology for EAI has been studied for at least a decade; but no satisfactory solution has been found from a practical viewpoint. EAI is becoming even more difficult due to the boom in various enterprise information and knowledge systems (and also to ever increasing competition in the technical software market). The study presented in this paper conducted a critical analysis of existing solutions to EAI. We consider EAI as having two generic issues: semantic integration and syntactic integration. The main problem of semantic integration reduces to the general problem of enterprise or business modelling. The main problem of syntactic integration reduces to the general problem of software architecture of enterprise applications which enables interoperability between any two EAs. While the first issue is studied in the manufacturing field, the second issue is studied in the computing engineering field. In this paper, both issues are put together under the context of EAI and studied. The result of the study, together with our experience with one Canadian manufacturing firm, has led to the identification of several issues to be addressed in the future. We also outline possible ways to approach these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of heterogeneous information systems has always been problematic in health-care organizations, as it is associated with the delivery of key services and has high operational costs. Therefore, health-care organizations are looking for new means to increase their functional capabilities and reduce integration cost. In addressing this need, enterprise application integration (EAI) technology has emerged to facilitate systems integration, enhance the quality of services, and reduce integration costs. Despite the application of EAI in other sectors, its adoption in health care is slow. In seeking to build on the limited normative research surrounding EAI, the authors of this paper focus on the evaluation of factors that influence EAI adoption in the health-care sector. In doing so, using fuzzy cognitive mapping as a technique to identify causal interrelationships among the EAI adoption factors. This approach will enhance the quality of the evaluation process and emphasizes the importance of each factor and its interrelationship with other factors. The outcomes shown in this paper will support health-care organizations' decision makers in exploring the implications surrounding EAI adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Enterprises turn to their software applications to support their business processes. Over time, it is common for a company to end up with a wide range of applications, which are usually developed in‐house by its information technology department or purchased from third‐party specialized software companies. The result is a heterogeneous software ecosystem with applications developed in different technologies and frequently using different data models, which brings challenges when two or more applications have to collaborate to support a business process. Integration platforms are specialized software tools that help design, implement, run, and monitor integration solutions that orchestrate a set of applications. The run‐time system is the component of integration platforms responsible for running integration solutions, which makes its performance a critically important issue. In this paper, we report our experience in evaluating and comparing four well‐known open‐source integration platforms in the context of a research project where performance was a central requirement to choose an integration platform. The evaluation was conducted using a decision‐making methodology to build a ranking of candidate platforms by means of subjective and objective criteria. The subjective evaluation takes into account expert preferences and compares integration platforms using the analytic hierarchy process, which has been used in many applications related with decision‐making. The objective evaluation is build on top of properties distributed on three dimensions, namely, message processing, hotspot detection, and fairness execution, which compose the research methodology we used. The evaluated platforms were ranked to identify the one with the best performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of shared understanding among stakeholders is a commonly cited drawback in enterprise architecture development. Stakeholders need to have shared understanding of requirements and principles for an enterprise architecture, and the extent to which the resultant architecture addresses their concerns. However, existing approaches for enterprise architecture development lack adequate capabilities for managing aspects associated with creating shared understanding among stakeholders. Although such aspects can be largely managed by approaches for collaborative decision making and soft systems thinking, these approaches lack details on the enterprise architecture process and its products. Therefore, this paper explores ways of mutually diminishing these gaps through adopting situational method engineering, to guide the development of a situational method for enabling stakeholders to acquire shared understanding of requirements for an enterprise architecture. The situational method presented herein is a component of a broader method for supporting collaboration between stakeholders and architects during enterprise architecture creation. Although the latter was successfully evaluated in 6 enterprises, it exhibited highest performance scores in two enterprises after it was amended with the situational method. Therefore, this paper also presents key findings from evaluating the situational method in the two agencies that are located in Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Business function‐specific stand‐alone enterprise applications (SEAs) are displacing functionally integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, despite strong empirical support for the business benefits of the latter. This study explores the conditions under which it may be more effective to use a set of SEAs instead of a single‐suite ERP system, and vice versa. Based on Organizational Information Processing Theory, we expect differences in effectiveness to grow in prominence when the uncertainty of the operating environment increases, that is, when operational glitches in production processes become more frequent. Extending the existing literature, we postulate that high functional differentiation is a precondition for SEAs to be more effective than an ERP system, hypothesizing that the level of functional interdependence ultimately determines which type of software is superior for a given production process. We test our hypotheses using data collected from 163 make‐to‐order (MTO) production processes nested within 73 manufacturing plants and seven supply chains of complex, high‐tech machinery. Results show that when functional interdependence is low, the negative effect of operational glitches on delivery performance is effectively mitigated in MTO production processes wherein process‐related information is managed predominantly using SEAs; conversely, when functional interdependence is high, using an ERP system is more effective. Our findings offer practical guidelines as to when to use SEAs versus an ERP system while also integrating and updating the findings of earlier empirical research, in which each has been analyzed separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise modernization refers to enhancing the capability of the existing application to meet the business demands. This modernization can lead to vast quantities of data generated from infrastructure, channels, database and other roots of computing involved which leads to the quantity of information generated. The data getting generated impact the resources called for these sorts of computing as it is directly proportional to recurring computing cost model and incurs a huge cost for enterprise opting for enterprise modernization. In this paper, we suggest a method to place the relevant transaction filtering of information in the context of enterprise modernization. This is answered by presenting the non-intrusive transaction aware filtering framework to get just the relevant information needed to further optimize the computing resources. Simulation and experimental results show an improvement in network, memory, throughput, CPU utilization compared against the non-transaction aware filtering during various load conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design patterns solve recurring design problems. One of the best practices, to solve a whole problem in a specific context, is to apply patterns in the form of a collection of related patterns, ie, a pattern language (PL). However, with the rapid growth of the number of patterns and their interrelationships in PLs and because manual verification of the applied PLs is a tedious and error-prone task, when designing in PL-based fashion, there is a need for tool support to verify the applied PLs. In our previous work, aimed at automating the development process of PL verification tools, a PL formalism was presented. This paper, based on the presented formalism, describes a framework called Pattern Language Verifier Generator (PLVGen) that automatically generates a pattern language verifier (PLV) for any given PL assuming its constituent patterns are represented in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Using a modelware approach, two metamodels named pattern language specification language (PLSL) and pattern specification language (PSL) are developed to model the given PL and its patterns, respectively. By getting the models of a PL and its patterns, PLVGen automatically generates an epsilon validation language (EVL) module representing the expected PLV. By launching PLV, the applied PL on a UML model will be verified. To evaluate the applicability of PLVGen in practice, we automatically generated three PLVs. The statistics regarding the generated PLVs, as case studies, illustrate the scalability of PLVGen. Compared with similar tools, the generated PLVs are more portable, transparent, and free of ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the most successful notation for the design of object-oriented applications. However, plain UML is not enough to characterize the web presentation tier of enterprise applications, including the navigational, structural and role-based access control (RBAC) features present in these applications. In this paper, we present Enterprise Web Application Extension (E-WAE), a lightweight UML extension for the modeling of these elements, which permits the inclusion of multitier, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and security design-level patterns in the models. Our approach follows a Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach, which enables the automatic generation of intermediate platform-specific models and automatic code generation for JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Active Server Pages.NET Model-View-Controller (ASP.NET MVC) frameworks. In addition, this generated code can be used as a low-cost mockup for early client validation of the navigational, structural and RBAC features of enterprise applications. E-WAE has been used with different applications. In this paper, we refer to the checkout process in the Amazon website, the delete resources use case in OdAJ2EE, an educational application developed by us, and the US Library of Congress Online Catalog search facility as examples of its applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise applications are being increasingly deployed on cloud infrastructures. Often, a cloud service provider (SP) enters into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a cloud subscriber, which specifies performance requirements for the subscriber's applications. An SP needs systematic Service Level Planning (SLP) tools that can help estimate the resources needed and hence the cost incurred to satisfy their customers' SLAs. Enterprise applications typically experience bursty workloads and the impact of such bursts needs to be considered during SLP exercises. Unfortunately, most existing approaches do not consider workload burstiness. We propose a Resource Allocation Planning (RAP) technique, which allows an SP to identify a time varying allocation plan of resources to applications that satisfies bursts. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed RAP variants can identify resource allocation plans that satisfy SLAs without exhaustively generating all possible plans. Furthermore, the results show that RAP can permit SPs to more accurately determine the capacity required for meeting specified SLAs compared to other competing techniques especially for bursty workloads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the purpose of supporting the design and analysis of enterprise application architecture, here, we report a tailored enterprise application architecture description framework and its corresponding design method. The presented framework can effectively support service-oriented architecting and cloud computing by creating the metadata model based on architecture content framework (ACF), DoDAF metamodel (DM2) and Cloud Computing Modelling Notation (CCMN). The framework also makes an effort to extend and improve the mapping between The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) application architectural inputs/outputs, deliverables and Department of Defence Architecture Framework (DoDAF)-described models. The roadmap of 52 DoDAF-described models is constructed by creating the metamodels of these described models and analysing the constraint relationship among metamodels. By combining the tailored framework and the roadmap, this article proposes a service-oriented enterprise application architecture development process. Finally, a case study is presented to illustrate the results of implementing the tailored framework in the Southern Base Management Support and Information Platform construction project using the development process proposed by the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enterprise applications consist of a set of applications that make up the software ecosystem. These can be developed in-house or acquired from third party companies. Generally these applications are developed in order to meet a demands/specific business need of the company without worrying of interacting with another existing system. The area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is able to provide all techniques and tools in order to integrate heterogeneous applications software ecosystem of companies. The Guaraná DSL is a language that enables designing conceptual models of integration solutions using a concrete graphical and intuitive syntax. Integrating the applications is not a trivial task and solution development involves addition of costs (time and resources), risks such as the appearance of bugs that most often are observed only after the implementation of the conceptual model. In this paper we propose a simulation model using Petri Nets that enable the analysis of the behavior of an integration solution developed to a real-world integration problem at Unijuí University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a research field that seeks to develop methodologies, techniques and tools to design and development integration solutions. The software ecosystem of companies is comprised of several applications, usually obtained from third parties or developed internally and custom-made for their business processes. Interest in EAI has arisen due to the need to integrate different applications composing the software ecosystem to allow business processes to evolve in response to the constant demands of the business market. The main challenge facing companies in this context is that most of their applications are not designed considering integration with other applications. The development of integration solutions is not a simple task. Guaraná technology provides a domain-specific language that allows for the design of conceptual models to represent integration solutions. This paper reports on a study of Petri Nets, Markov Chains and Queueing Theory, aiming to construct simulation models from conceptual models of integration solutions modeled with Guaraná. We map the building blocks Slot and Task of Guaraná to their corresponding elements in the mathematical modelling languages studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chains (SCs) can be managed at many levels. The use of tactical SC planning models with multiple flexibility options can help manage the usual operations efficiently and effectively, whilst improve the SC resiliency in response to inherent environmental uncertainties. This paper defines tactical SC flexibility and identifies tactical flexibility measures and options for development of flexible SC planning models. A classification of the existing literature of SC planning is introduced that highlights the characteristics of published flexibility inclusive models. Additional classifications from the reviewed literature are presented based on the integration of flexibility options used, solution methods utilized, and real world applications presented. These classifications are helpful for identifying research gaps in the current literature and provide insights for future modeling and research efforts in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been well studied, and it is being adopted at a very fast pace. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the key factor in many enterprises. Traditionally, SOA technique can be applied to EAI, especially the application of Web Service. In this paper, we propose that SaaS can also be applied to the field of EAI. Based on this, we propose the SaaS-based EAI approach which rebuilds one analog of legacy applications into SaaS architecture makes the rest applications be configured, and further solves the EAI problem. Besides, we also update the traditional SaaS maturity model, discuss relationships between SOA and SaaS in EAI, and explain how to further integrate SaaS applications by SOA. We implement an Eclipse plug-in which can introduce SaaS capabilities into traditional Web application automatically. Finally, the proposed approach is proved to be effective through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operations of companies have become over-dependent on their supporting enterprise software applications. This situation has placed a heavy burden onto software maintenance teams who are expected to keep these applications up and running optimally in varying execution conditions. However, this high human intervention drives up the overall costs of software ownership. In addition, the current dynamic nature of enterprise applications constitutes challenges with respect to their architectural design and development, and the guarantee of the agreed quality requirements at runtime. Efficiently and effectively achieving the adaptation of enterprise applications requires an autonomic solution. In this paper, we present SHIFT, a framework that provides (i) facilities and mechanisms for managing self-adaptive enterprise applications using an autonomic infrastructure, and (ii) automated derivation of self-adaptive enterprise applications and their respective monitoring infrastructure. Along with the framework, our work led us to propose a reference specification and architectural design for implementing self-adaptation autonomic infrastructures. We developed a reference implementation of SHIFT; our contribution includes the development of monitoring infrastructures, and dynamic adaptation planning and automated derivation strategies. SHIFT, along with its autonomic infrastructure and derived enterprise application, can provide a cost-effective mean to fulfill the agreed quality in these types of applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise architecture frameworks define the goals of enterprise architecture in order to make business processes and IT operations more effective, and to reduce the risk of future investments. These enterprise architecture frameworks offer different architecture development methods that help in building enterprise architecture. In practice, the larger organizations become, the larger their enterprise architecture and IT become. This leads to an increasingly complex system of enterprise architecture development and maintenance. Application software architecture is one type of architecture that, along with business architecture, data architecture and technology architecture, composes enterprise architecture. From the perspective of integration, enterprise architecture can be considered a system of interaction between multiple examples of application software. Therefore, effective software integration is a very important basis for the future success of the enterprise architecture in question. This article will provide interface-based integration practice in order to help simplify the process of building such a software integration system. The main goal of interface-based software integration is to solve problems that may arise with software integration requirements and developing software integration architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing interest in affective computing (AC) brings a lot of valuable research topics that can meet different application demands in enterprise systems. The present study explores a sub area of AC techniques – textual emotion recognition for enhancing enterprise computing. Multi-label emotion recognition in text is able to provide a more comprehensive understanding of emotions than single label emotion recognition. A representation of ‘emotion state in text’ is proposed to encompass the multidimensional emotions in text. It ensures the description in a formal way of the configurations of basic emotions as well as of the relations between them. Our method allows recognition of the emotions for the words bear indirect emotions, emotion ambiguity and multiple emotions. We further investigate the effect of word order for emotional expression by comparing the performances of bag-of-words model and sequence model for multi-label sentence emotion recognition. The experiments show that the classification results under sequence model are better than under bag-of-words model. And homogeneous Markov model showed promising results of multi-label sentence emotion recognition. This emotion recognition system is able to provide a convenient way to acquire valuable emotion information and to improve enterprise competitive ability in many aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its changing environment. Aiming at eliminating the integration challenges, EA is proposed as a solution. The purpose of this paper is to survey and analyse the available literature on determining the role of EA in EI and also to identify gaps and state-of-the-art in research. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a systematic mapping study that found 50 papers in the intersection of EA and EI, these papers were surveyed, analysed, and classified with respect to research focus, research method, and paper type. Findings – Based on the analyses of the final 50 articles, the authors realized that “EA framework” is the dominating research focus of these studies. “Evaluation research” is recognized as the most common paper type in this area. However, “Experience paper” was a rare paper type in this research domain. “Constructive research” and “Case study/multiple case studies” are widely applied as the research method. “Survey”, “Delphi study” and “Grounded theory” are the least employed research methods. The conclusion was that there is a need for empirical research in this area. After analysing the articles based on their publication year, the authors also noticed a significant growth between 2004 and 2010. After 2010 the number of publications had a downward trend. Originality/value – To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first systematic literature study regarding the role of EA in EI. There are several systematic literature reviews about the EA or EI separately but none of them has addressed the specific realm of the research. Hence, the goal of this study is to provide a map of existing literature to enable improvement of the practice with the known research results and to identify gaps for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud Computing provides solution to licensing, distribution, configuration, and operation of enterprise application associated with the traditional IT infrastructure. Thus to define Quality of Service (QoS) clients and service providers need to establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The main objective of service providers is to improve Customer Satisfaction Level (CSL). In this paper, we present a method to minimize the number of reports generated by adapting the method of Window based State Monitoring framework and thereby reporting only the continuous state violations. In previous works, the issue of SLA violation has not received thorough analysis. In this work, we will keep track of the violation in processing a user request and the CPU utilization during the completion of the task. This will play a major role in avoiding the performance degradation encountered by a VM. Another major contribution of this paper is committed to detailed analysis of the state of Cloud environments and datacenter resources with relevant energy consumption during the processing time of a user request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cloud computing paradigm encompasses several key differentiating elements and technologies, tackling a number of inefficiencies, limitations and problems that have been identified in the distributed and virtualized computing domain. Nonetheless, and as it is the case for all emerging technologies, their adoption led to the presentation of new challenges and new complexities. In this paper we present key application areas and capabilities of future scenarios, which are not tackled by current advancements and highlight specific requirements and goals for advancements in the cloud computing domain. We discuss these requirements and goals across different focus areas of cloud computing, ranging from cloud service and application integration, development environments and abstractions, to interoperability and relevant to it aspects such as legislation. The future application areas and their requirements are also mapped to the aforementioned areas in order to highlight their dependencies and potential for moving cloud technologies forward and contributing towards their wider adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) based proposal for research outcomes information management. The proposal is contextualized in terms of national and international science and research outcomes information management, corresponding supporting information systems and ecosystems. Information systems interoperability problems, approaches, technologies and tools are presented and applied to the research outcomes information management case. A business and technological perspective is provided, including the conceptual analysis and modelling, an integration solution based in a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and the orchestration engine to execute the proposed solution. For illustrative purposes, the role and information system needs of a research unit is assumed as the representative case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise Application Integration has played an important role in providing methodologies, techniques and tools to develop integration solutions, aiming at reusing current applications and supporting the new demands that arise from the evolution of business processes in companies. Cloud-computing is part of a new reality in which companies have at their disposal a high-capacity IT infrastructure at a low-cost, in which integration solutions can be deployed and run. The charging model adopted by cloud-computing providers is based on the amount of computing resources consumed by clients. Such demand of resources can be computed either from the implemented integration solution, or from the conceptual model that describes it. It is desirable that cloud-computing providers supply detailed conceptual models describing the variability of services and restrictions between them. However, this is not the case and providers do not supply the conceptual models of their services. The conceptual model of services is the basis to develop a process and provide supporting tools for the decision-making on the deployment of integration solutions to the cloud. In this paper, we review the literature on cloud configuration modelling, and compare current proposals based on a comparison framework that we have developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise applications are aimed at managing enterprise operational data and improving business efficiency. Many enterprise applications have been developed over the past three decades, therefore, known as legacy systems. Usually, they are monolith, inflexible, poorly documented and hard to maintain. The purpose of this paper is to describe best practices and limitations for enterprise application decomposition based on the results of the systematic literature review in order to introduce an approach for enterprise application decomposition. The paper focuses on decomposition of large-scale systems using clustering methods. The investigation is performed as part of the university-industry collaboration research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]