Master Thesis

Together with a friend of mine, Eivind Bengtsson, I wrote a thesis about choosing a technology for system integration. The result was a decision support tool, that can help gather enough information about an integration situation, to be able to present a specific, well informed suggestions to management, about which technology can be used to solve the problem at hand.

The thesis is in danish, but an english abstract is available. To save you from downloading the whole thing, here is the full abstract:

---

It is an enormous challenge to use the IT systems in the organisation to full extent.

One of the biggest difficulties, is to integrate the IT systems very effectively, in order to achieve and use synergies from the integration, in the best possible way.

The amount of technology and products available for integration, is as vast and overwhelming as the challenge to use them. Furthermore, choosing a specific technology requires that the organisation has an overview of the needs and consequences of a system integration. Implementing a system integration will effect many parts of the organisation, and the effect varies depending on which technology is chosen. It can therefore seem impossible to know which technology to choose.

With this thesis, we have set out to solve this particular problem. Our decision support tool can make it clear which integration technology to choose, while taking the organisation's situation into account. This guarantees that the technology one chooses, as a result of using the decision support tool, will suit the organisation. At the same time, by using the decision support tool, one will have gained an overview of the consequences this choice will have for the rest of the organisation.

By reflecting upon the consequences a system integration will have for the rest of the organisation, and how the organisation can influence the decision process, it is possible to map the organisation's situation. The decision support tool will ensure that all aspects of an organisation are covered including it's structure, people, technology, tasks, environment and financial limitations.

The decision support tool makes it easy to see which technologies are not suited for solving the integration problem in question. That way the result will be a few clear suggestions as to which technology will be suitable. The suggestions will be quick for management to choose from, since they will mainly differ in price, vendor or strategy.

In order to produce the decision support tool, we have used information partly from well known analyst companies and partly from literature, specific to the technologies we have delt with in this thesis. Furthermore we have personal experience from real life integration problems and have tested the decision support tool on two of them.

The tests show how the decision support tool works and how it can guarantee a good solution to a particular integration problem.