Applications such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) and integrated collaboration environments have become imperative for organizations that need to maintain their competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking these applications and others in order to realize financial and operational competitive advantages.

One of the challenges facing modern organizations is giving all their workers complete, transparent and real-time access to information. Many of the legacy applications still in use did not support seamless movement of information from one application to the other. EAI, as a discipline, aims to alleviate many of these problems as well as create new paradigms for truly lean proactive organizations.

EAI intends to transcend the simple goal of linking applications and attempts to enable new and innovative ways of leveraging organizational knowledge to create further competitive advantages for the enterprise.

When different systems cannot share their data effectively, they create information bottlenecks that require human intervention in the form of decision-making or data entry. With a properly deployed EAI architecture, organizations are able to focus most of their efforts on their value creating core competencies instead of focusing on workflow management.