A shared information system architecture for integrating risk management tools: a case study

Many organizations would benefit from enterprise-wide, shared information systems. It is common for these organizations to have in place a number of smaller information systems, each of which solves a portion of the problem. Typically, these smaller systems will have been developed independently of one another. As a result, they exhibit many forms of heterogeneity, which pose many impediments to integration. In this paper, we propose and justify an architecture suitable for integrating these smaller systems into a shared information system. The architecture must, to varying degrees of importance, be flexible, responsive, space-efficient, scalable, easy to use, and reliable. The integration effort must also be taken into account. Illustrations are taken from an ongoing case study in which two systems that operate on complementary areas of risk management are being integrated and extended.