World Wide Integration, Inc.
John Schmidt
World Wide Integration is an information technology consulting firm specializing in Integration Competency Center (ICC) services including Program Management, Integration Methodology and Information Architecture.
Why an Integration Competency Center (ICC)?
"By year-end 2005, more than half of large enterprises (those with more than $1 billion in revenue) will have a central ICC, an increase of approximately 30 percent over 2003."
Gartner Group
"Rather than doing one-off integrations project by project, smart firms will coordinate integration efforts across their enterprises—and save millions in the process."
Forrester Research
To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Experience has shown that, regardless of requirements:
- People familiar with FTP will use it for all their integration requirements
- People familiar with file shares will use them
- People familiar with ETL will use it
- People familiar with databases will use them
- People familiar with queues will use them
- People familiar with application servers will use them
The result in many large corporations is an Integration Hairball.
The hairball is the result of years of incrementally building interfaces between applications by project teams operating in silos. In the absence of a prescriptive architecture, each team selects tools they are most familiar with and defines their own development and operational standards. The team disbands at the end of the project leaving behind documentation that is difficult to maintain resulting in evaporation of tacit knowledge. Over time, the inconsistencies between interfaces and imperfect understanding of dependencies between applications results in unstable operations, production “surprises”, high cost of maintainance, missed SLA's and delays in implementing new business solutions.
The large number of interfaces in a Fortune 1000 company is not the issue; all modern enterprises have a diverse application portfolio that is necessary to compete in the marketplace and support the business. The issue is the inconsistency of integration standards and lack of a holistic understanding of dependencies which creates unpredictability and loss of control; we call this Chaos.
What does an ICC do?
An ICC maintains the usefulness and integrity of existing systems. Replacing every single system to keep pace with new technologies or to consolidate duplicate systems after an acquisition is often financially unfeasible. And sometimes maverick systems in little-known departments own business-critical functions. A deliberate integration design center makes it easier to fold in existing systems without an all-out IT overhaul.
An ICC scales by normalizing integration interfaces through the use of standards. So when one change is made, it flows through to all affected interfaces without the need for manual re-coding.
An ICC is agile and extensible. When a new system or trading partner comes online, it can immediately “plug in,” given a set of common and consistent standards.
An ICC retains corporate knowledge. Services costs for integration projects typically range from 35% to 70% of the total cost. An ICC makes human effort reusable and forms a self-perpetuating knowledge base within the enterprise.
Integration managed by individual project teams often results in unproductive finger-pointing when things go wrong. The ICC provides a single point of contact and accountability; the integration buck stops here.
The benefits of an ICC are lower integration costs, higher project success rates and a more stable and adaptable infrastructure. For additional information including an overview of five ways to organize an Integration Competency Center, download an ICC brochure.