Stuttgart, Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2007.

Zugl.: Oldenburg, Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2005.

Habil.-Schr., Univ. St. Gallen, 2004.

Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr., 2004--St. Gallen.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2008.

Diss. Univ. St. Gallen, 2006.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diplomarb., 2005.

The Higher Education (HE) sector of a country is a key area indicating the progress of cultural, political and social growth and development. Public and social demands as well as technological developments add new challenges for this sector. Consequently, higher education institutions have changed and a more flexible IT infrastructure is required to enable them to adapt efficiently to competitive business challenges. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is a technology that effectively integrates intra- and inter-organizational systems. Firstly a systematic review of the EAI literature was conducted. From this review, it was apparent that there are no theoretical models for EAI adoption and evaluation for higher education. Hence, this research contributes a conceptual model that includes influential factors derived from the literature and combines them with the proposed classification of influential factors for HE to produce an EAI conceptual model for the HE domain. To validate this proposed model empirical research was conducted. Then, the model was tested using a qualitative case study approach by means of three case studies that were conducted at different universities. Exploratory, explanatory and interpretive data analysis phases were implemented to find what is the current EAI process of HE and how these institutions currently work. In addition, these phases were employed to identify the EAI adoption factors in HE. As a result of this analysis the conceptual model was modified because of complementary factors that emerged. Therefore, the main contribution of this research is a comprehensive and novel model for EAI adoption in higher education area. The adoption EAI factors were identified by extracting a number of parameters from the empirical data. Several important factors that influence and assist the adoption of EAI in HE were identified. Hence, an additional contribution is the classification of factors in EAI adoption into technical and social factors which provides a better understanding of these factors. A further contribution is the derivation of a new classification of the EAI external and internal pressure factors. The development of a consistent model for the adoption and evaluation of EAI in HE is based on these factors.

Using different information systems and correct communication between them are very important problem at this time. Modern companies have a large number of major applications that take care of running the business. At different times, different people used different technologies to write these applications for different purposes. Data resources can be at many different forms in organization: relational databases, object databases, XML documents and etc. Databases can operate with different systems and use distinct software. This problem must be solved by enterprise application integration (EAI) systems. The project analyzes data level EAI. This type of integration is relatively inexpensive and it doesn’t need to incur the expense of changing, testing, and deploying the application. XML can be a powerful ally for data integration. The main purpose of this project was to analyze usage of XML technologies possibilities for data integration. The problem solved is how to use the same XML flow for a several purposes: the change of another database(s), transforming to a HTML document and forming a PDF document for printing. These problems are analyzed and solved in the particular range – organization of management of public utility. Here is designed and realized an information system.

IT environments are turning more complex by the day and this trend is poised to rise in the coming years. To manage IT resources and maximize productivity better, large organizations are striving for better methods to control their current environments. They also have to prepare for future complexity growth as their environments cater to the growing IT needs. In the current economic recession, organizations are not only threatened by the growing complexity, but also have to cope with limited personnel due to financial constraints. Organizations are ardent about obtaining new technology to have firmer control on different platforms, vendors, and solutions at a reasonable cost. At the same time, this new technology must deliver quality services that can effectively fulfill customer needs. To deal with IT management challenges, CA developed Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SAM), a product by CA Inc. (formerly Computer Associates) to solve complex IT environment service management problems. SAM can provide organizations with a wide-ranging view of their multi-faceted IT environments by providing vital pieces of information that no other software can perceive. Thus, SAM can monitor and manage systems, databases, networks, applications, and end-user experiences. Although, this technology is able to detect many errors and problems, it still lacks a good mechanism to diagnose the detected problems and uncover their root causes for end users to fix. Four research groups from Universities of Alberta, Toronto, Victoria and Waterloo—under the auspices of the Consortium for Software Engineering Research—built different tools for root-cause analysis and detection. To integrate these solutions, these research groups worked together with CA Inc. to produce a web-based integration tool to integrate these add-ons into the main SAM application. The resulting framework does not affect any of SAM’s existing features as the additions only involve a new web communication layer that acts from the core of the software to detect and present root causes. The detection tools only parse the log files for vital information and thus the core functionality of the software remains unaffected. My contributions to this research project are presented in this thesis. In the beginning of this thesis, I report on background research on SAM and describe how it is going to solve the increasing complexity problem in IT environments. Later on, I propose two software integration approaches to integrate root cause diagnosis tools with SAM and briefly describe CA’s latest software integration framework Catalyst. Towards the end of this thesis, I compare our integration solution with Catalyst, and discuss advantages and disadvantages of these integration solutions. / Graduate