e‐Business systems integration: a systems perspective

Systems science has emerged as a meta‐discipline and a meta‐language, correspondingly, which can be applied to discuss issues in e‐business systems and relevant enterprise architecture and enterprise integration. A lot of researches on enterprise architecture and enterprise integration in e‐business systems have their theoretical findings and effective practices naturally influenced by systems theory and relative methodologies. This paper strives to review the contribution of systems theory to enterprise architecture and integration. It also tries to summarize methods or tools applied on enterprise systems level, and to investigate many crucial scopes, concepts and their interrelationship in e‐business systems integration activities. Finally, this paper presents new prospects in enterprise architecture and integration for e‐business systems. All of these may be useful to deal with the increase complex informatics issues of modern enterprises.