A review of the academic and practitioner literature identified four key categories of barriers to information integration. Experience and research shows that any single initiative is faced with a myriad of highly interdependent barriers, and as a result integration teams must employ multiple strategies to overcome these barriers. The cases illustrate a number of examples where integration teams adopted strategies to mitigate the impact of each barrier as well as the cumulative effect of multiple barriers. The following section presents the four integration barrier categories followed by a set of strategies found in the case studies used to overcome these barriers.

Table 2. Integration barrier categories

Turf and resistance to change
IT and data incompatibility
Organizational Diversity and Multiple Goals
Environmental and institutional complexity