Determinants and Influences of Information Systems Integration in a Public Higher Education Context

Review Of The Literature And Gaps

During the 1990s, IS integration was defined simply as the extent to which data and application systems are shared and accessed through communication networks for organizational use (Wyse & Higgin, 1993). Since then, the definition of IS integration has expanded to include application integration that involves electronic linking of autonomous applications (Grant & Tu, 2005) and the connection of disparate systems (Markus, 2001). Systems integration encompasses data and the communication network (Bhatt, 2000; Bhatt & Troutt, 2005), system interoperability, communication among systems, interorganizational process reengineering, and standardization of existing systems (i.e., uniformity), which collectively represent a natural extension of a user or routine (i.e., assimilation) or a system’s adoption or diffusion (Modol, 2006). The scope of IS integration has expanded to include both organizational and process integration. Organizational integration indicates coordination among a firm’s disparate departments and functions, while process integration means the minimization of communication and coordination within the process of an activity (Berente et al., 2009).

IS integration has been researched in various contexts, including customer relationship management in the pharmaceutical industry (Svoboda et al., 2021), project success in government units (Kolasa et al., 2020), green environment (Bakolo, 2019), small and medium-sizes enterprises (SMEs) (Francalanci & Morabito, 2008; Raymond et al., 2013), supply chains (Hou, 2019; Kauremaa & Tanskanen, 2016; Rajaguru & Matanda, 2013; Zhang et al. 2022), manufacturing (Lee et al., 2022), health informatics (Dlodlo & Hamunyela, 2017), healthcare management (Wu & Trigo, 2021), mergers and acquisitions (Chang et al., 2014; Henningsson & Kettinger, 2017; Tanriverdi & Uysal, 2011), IT spending on cybersecurity measures (Baskerville et al., 2018), and IT vendors (Ceci et al., 2019). IS integration has also been studied from intra- and interorganizational perspectives and in for-profit organizations (Chowanetz et al., 2012; Rajaguru & Matanda, 2013; Wong et al., 2015), but little research has been conducted on IS integration from an intraorganizational perspective in higher education. Recent studies show that systems integration capability predicts firm performance in automotive business environment (Geleilate et al., 2021), promotes reduction of transactional costs (Wróbel & Hernes, 2020), and affects specific cost improvements (Maiga, 2017).