Implementation of the Integrated Academic Ecosystem Enterprise Architecture (IAEEA): Development and Demonstration of the APASIFIC Digital Academic Ecosystem

Abstrak

<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Abstract The increasing fragmentation of academic information systems has become a major challenge for higher education institutions, scholarly associations, and professional organizations in managing memberships, scholarly publishing, professional certification, conferences, organizational governance, and research activities through isolated digital platforms. Although specialized information systems have improved operational efficiency within individual domains, they frequently operate independently with limited interoperability, resulting in duplicated researcher identities, inconsistent institutional data, fragmented administrative workflows, and reduced organizational efficiency (Ross et al., 2006; The Open Group, 2022). In our previous study, the Integrated Academic Ecosystem Enterprise Architecture (IAEEA) was proposed as a domain-specific Enterprise Architecture framework developed using the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to provide a unified conceptual model capable of integrating multiple academic services into a single enterprise ecosystem (Hevner et al., 2004; Peffers et al., 2007). However, although the conceptual framework established the architectural foundation, its practical feasibility as an operational software ecosystem had not yet been empirically validated. This study presents the implementation, demonstration, and engineering validation of the IAEEA framework through the development of the APASIFIC Digital Academic Ecosystem (https://apasific.org), a cloud-native academic platform designed to operationalize the architectural principles proposed in the previous research. The implemented platform integrates academic membership management, scholarly publishing, double-blind peer review, professional certification, organizational governance, and interoperability with international scholarly infrastructures within a unified digital environment supported by shared identity management, modular bounded contexts, relational database architecture, reusable software components, and serverless application services (Lankhorst, 2017; The Open Group, 2022). Engineering validation demonstrates that the proposed enterprise architecture has been successfully instantiated as a production-grade software artifact consisting of multiple bounded contexts, RESTful application programming interfaces, integrated relational databases, reusable application services, and interoperability with global scholarly infrastructures including ORCID, Crossref, and Zenodo. Repository traceability further confirms the alignment between the conceptual IAEEA framework and its physical realization through direct mappings between enterprise capabilities, software modules, application programming interfaces, database entities, and operational platform features (Hevner et al., 2004; Gregor &amp; Hevner, 2013). The findings demonstrate that the IAEEA framework is not only theoretically sound but also practically implementable as an integrated academic digital ecosystem. The APASIFIC Digital Academic Ecosystem (https://apasific.org) therefore represents a validated Design Science Research artifact that provides empirical evidence of how enterprise architecture principles can be systematically transformed into a scalable,interoperable, and production-grade academic software platform capable of supporting diverse organizational activities within a unified ecosystem.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Scope: Teknologi Informasi, Keywords: Enterprise Architecture; Design Science Research; Academic Information Systems; Digital Ecosystem; Scholarly Publishing; Professional Certification; Cloud-native Architecture.</p>

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