Smart-EIS: An End to End Enterprise Information Systems Framework

Abstract

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are widely and extensively used in many domains such as banking, telecommunication, e-commerce and government. Although several research studies and investigations were performed that explore the importance of EIS, only a few studies have focused on effective and efficient end-to-end approaches to developing such systems. In this article, a proposed software development framework (Smart-EIS) is presented. The primary objective of Smart-EIS is making the development of high-quality EIS more effective and efficient. In particular, it aims to reduce the development cost and to provide built-in transparent quality, security, performance and user-experience features. A comprehensive review of the traditional EIS is presented. This includes a discussion of the characteristics and patterns of such systems, the layered architectural patterns and the main components of these systems. The working methodology for the work discussed in this article depends on dynamically construct the common and general aspects of EIS at runtime. The methodology starts with extracting metadata models from the traditional architectural and components patterns. Based on these metadata, APIs have been designed and implemented. These libraries were then composed to make the full and complete proposed framework. In terms of validation and evaluation, the proposed framework -including its APIs- has been implemented as open-source projects, used to build a simple human resource management system, then utilized to re-build a student information system. Results of validation and evaluation have been presented and discussed, which show promising potential.