Technical Risk Management on Enterprise Integration Projects

Enterprise Integration (EI) is essential to organisations wishing to fulfill broader business objectives related to e-business, customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce. This paper describes and presents the results of a study into practices for managing technical risk on EI projects. In the study, 21 managers participated in a facilitated workshop or interview sessions to identify areas of risk (RAs) associated with EI projects and risk management practices (RMP) for addressing those RAs. Risks were identified in four separate phases in the lifecycle of an EI project, namely the strategy, planning, implementation and rollout phases. Many of the risks identified were not specific to EI projects, but were applicable to large IT projects in general. The paper is primarily concerned with technical risk although some aspects of business and organizational risk are discussed briefly.