Designing enterprise integration solutions - Effectively

The design of large and complex enterprise integration solutions is a difficult task because designers must respond not only to the 'requirements' from a diverse set of users, but also because a successful design outcome must respond to the 'constraints' provided by the current set of legacy applications. The problem, therefore, belongs to a category of problems where design knowledge is difficult to articulate and reuse. In particular, the nature and form of knowledge for conceptual design of systems integration solutions continues to be a concern. In this paper, we investigate whether design knowledge in the form of patterns can be reused to develop systems integration solutions, and whether such reuse leads to more effective design outcomes. The research follows Design Science guidelines in that we describe a research artifact, and evaluate it to assess whether it meets the intended goals. The results indicate that approaches to facilitate reuse of conceptual design knowledge are feasible in the domain of enterprise integration, and that such reuse does, in fact, lead to more effective design solutions.