Large organisations and businesses are composed of different functional areas, such as finance, HR, customer management, engineering services, product manufacturing, storage and warehousing. These functional areas carry out different operations in order to fulfil the goals of the business and often use a variety of different IT systems (e.g. stock control, accounts, HR, etc.) from a range of different suppliers and vendors to service their needs. The success of any large business or enterprise in achieving its goals depends on the ability of IT systems to effectively communicate with each other.

However, IT systems from different vendors or suppliers often use different hardware and/or software platforms and services, thus creating the need for systems integration.

This course introduces students to enterprise business requirements, and the need and purpose of systems integration to support organisational goals. Students are expected to gather and review business objectives with the aim of developing a systems specification document. As part of a feasibility analysis, students are expected to evaluate factors and issues affecting the successful completion of integration, including describing and documenting the functional architecture and design of a system. Students are also expected to explore hardware and software technologies used to connect systems and subsystems and establish an integration methodology to design and implement an integrated solution. In addition, students will investigate and compare different cloud service models and evaluate different deployment methods and consider their effect on systems integration.

Among the topics included in this course are: enterprise business objectives, purpose and operation of systems integration, systems specification documents, feasibility analysis, risk assessments, architectural development, hardware and software technologies for systems integration, operational configuration, systems integration design framework, design, development and deployment of a systems integration solution, quality assurance, cloud services as a systems integration provision, cloud service models and different deployment models, such as private and public cloud
services.

On successful completion of this course students will be able to analyse systems integration requirements with regard to business objectives, investigate different hardware and software systems with regard to connectivity, communication and data transfer, prepare a suitable integrated solution based on a set of business requirements and compare a range of cloud computing providers and evaluate their services.

As a result they will develop skills such as communication literacy, critical thinking, analysis, reasoning and interpretation, which are crucial for gaining employment and developing academic competence.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course a student will be able to:

1. Analyse systems integration requirements with regards to business objectives.

2. Investigate different hardware and software systems with regards to connectivity, communication and data transfer.

3. Prepare a suitable integrated solution based on a set of business requirements.

4. Compare a range of cloud computing providers and evaluate their services.