EPOs, an early warning system for post-merger IS integration

Abstract

Our approach allows for identifying and assessing indicators that signal the risk of failure in post-merger integration of information systems with the help of an early warning system. The applied research method is Design Science Research complemented by a real case study. The main artifact is the EPOs prototype we developed, applying semantic technologies, namely an ontology and an inference engine, for the automatic identification, validation and quantification of risk indicators. If a certain threshold is reached, a warning message is triggered including the ponderosity of the risk to fail. We evaluated our approach based on two real world scenarios.