overview of the given Literature Review and Proposal:

Literature Review

Rise of the digital economy

Across the world, business models are now created based on the increasing needs of customers driven by diverse technology applications. Competition on a global scale is now fueled by the rising advancements in complex technologies and digital platforms. With this premise in mind, even organizations that have invested heavily in information technology frameworks are no longer achieving the results they desire (Gates, and Hemingway, 2000). The markets are being taken over by disruptive startups that are using disruptive technologies to address customer needs. Unlike in the past where most businesses only concentrated on the product, in today?s global markets, many efforts are now on understanding specific customer needs.

The digital economy has brought about revolution in business operations and service delivery while at the same time driving numerous organizations out of business. According to Malecki and Moriset (2007), the digital economy is characterized by linkages between digital computing tools and applications and human relationships for communication to enable prudent decision making. This linkage enables fast and efficient service delivery and the development of products that meet specific customer needs. According to Castells (2011),?customers can now shop at the comfort of their couch and have the product delivered at their doorsteps shortly. In the same light, by using various digital applications, customers can learn of the pricing and value of products based on reviews by other customers.

Information in the digital economy is a asset that must be used for the right reasons. While the digital economy brings about numerous benefits, it has also its fair share of business perils. According to Castells (2011),?privacy remains among the top concerns of customers with regards to the use of their personal information by organizations. As such, organizations must remain alert in ensuring that customer information is safeguarded against access by unauthorized persons. Through digital applications, the information can be analyzed to provide insights about customer shopping habits. This is in turn sued to provide services and products that target a specific customer segment and ensure that marketing strategies are relevant to the needs of each customer.

The benefits of the digital economy can be used to the advantage of any business in establishing business sustainability and competitiveness. However, according to Gates and Hemingway (2000),?most business organizations simply adopt technologies and applications without a clear vision of their usage to align with the digital economy. It is for this reason that numerous business organizations have complex technologies and yet they are still beaten by even small startups that operate virtually unlike the traditional brick and mortar stores (Davenport, 2013). For any organization to be able to leverage the values driven by various applications there must be an effective enterprise application integration framework. This enables the integration of various software applications to deliver the desired results in line with an organization?s strategic plan.?

The need for enterprise application integration

The digital economy requires the integration of various operations in order to deliver fast and high quality services and products to the customers. This enables organizations to minimize costs and maximize profits without compromising the ability to meet customer demands. According to Gable (2002), the reason why most organizations are failing, despite adoption of numerous applications, is the lack of integration. Enterprise application integration is a framework that enables the integration of enterprise applications in an organization to enable seamless usage and collaborations (Gable, 2002).

Enterprise integration application (EAI) brings about the integration of key hardware and software systems to bring about a digital transformation. In most cases, a business organization that is technology-driven has supply chains, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, human resource management (HRM) applications and business intelligence applications (BIA) as the main technologies (Hohpe and Woolf, 2004). In most cases, these applications operate as standalone applications independent of each other. In the digital economy, there is an increased need for the collaboration and integration of such systems to enable speedy operations. Most of these systems are usually incompatible due to differences in operating systems and database systems used in their development. An enterprise application integration comes in handy to enable the integration of such systems and thus enables more automation, collaboration and sharing of information across the organization.?

The end goals of business enterprise applications integration is the enablement of automated and unrestricted sharing of information on an organizational scale. It also leads to linkages between employees, suppliers and customers which drastically improves human relations. Another goal is that integration enables the automation of business processes through linkages of various software application platforms, systems and tools (Conrad, Hasselbring, Koschel, and Tritsch, 2005). Consequently, this reduces the down times of systems and minimizes the need for maintenance. The overall result is the improvement of customer service delivery and quality of products which makes the organization competitive.

TIBCO Business Works for integration

TIBCO Business works is an enterprise application integration framework that enables organization to acquire seamless integration. The application is useful in enabling organizations to migrate from traditional legacy systems and become fully fledged digital driven organizations. It is provided based on Software as a Service (SaaS) which makes it easy for organizations to adopt and implement since it requires little or no coding. This platform has becoming a leading application with its deployment in over 1000 companies across the world for integration and assistance in easy assembling of new software products (Tibco, n.d). It is ideal for service-oriented organizations since it brings about the required integration for data sharing and collaboration among the key business stakeholders.?

The TIBCO BW application brings about integration by focusing on three main areas in any organization. The first need that it addresses is the increasing volumes of big data which in most cases become too big to handle for organizations. TIBCO enables organizations to turn the big data into a asset that drive business value. The data is analyzed to provide systematic and reliable insight on customer complaints, sales volumes and product demands. This is used in determining the best course of action and enables the creation of relationships that are custom to each customer segment. By responding to customers through their digital channels of choice, a business can appeal to them better compared to competitors.

The other key aspect that TIBCO addresses is people and organizational processes since the success of an organization greatly depends on its people. TIBCO enables the overhaul of traditional processes through the adoption of digital solutions. In this regard, employees can become more flexible and collaborative in execution of operations. This is done through the integration of key operations, business processes and social collaboration to create customer loyalty and hence success of the digital transformation. By increasing the quality of customer relations and business management processes, the organization can generate better responses to marketing strategies and thus achieve the targeted sales. In addition, the relationships are also managed through mobile Software as a Service (SaaS) which enhances customer?s flexibility and ease of access to services. ?This creates a typical business landscape as illustrated below: