E-integration needs Business Integration
By William M. Ulrich
(Originally appeared in Computerworld Nov. 20, 2000)
The number of vendors supporting e-business integration requirements is growing at an astounding pace. Almost 200 vendors fall into the e-business and application integration (EAI) category. While they offer a variety of products and services, they have one thing in common: They treat integration as a technical issue that can be addressed with technical solutions. But this approach ignores the root cause of the integration challenge - the lack of integration within the business infrastructures that IT supports.
Here's why business integration is key to e-business integration. A telecommunications company with 18 billing systems or a bank with 25 customer databases didn't get that way by design; they were created as these companies grew through consolidation and other business activity. These examples reflect a growing lack of cohesiveness within the business units themselves. Mergers, acquisitions and antiquated management infrastructures spawned organizational and procedural redundancies that evolved into today's IT integration challenge.
To put this into perspective, let's outline the formidable task that's facing IT organizations. Web-based applications require common data views and a seamless transaction flow, which legacy environments don't support. IT must find a way to address the inherent fragmentation, redundancies and inconsistencies found within legacy data and system architectures to support e-business projects. For example, real-time access for an order being taken over the Internet requires the triggering of a series of back-end inventory, shipping, billing and accounting transactions that were never designed to function in Web time. The data and systems that are needed to fully execute this type of transaction span multiple databases, systems, users and environments. Similar challenges exist in online banking, telecommunications, manufacturing and other industries.
Integration vendors offer tools to address some of these requirements. Data-integration tools consolidate legacy data across multiple databases and deliver this information to Web-enabled users. This is a useful approach, but it has limitations. Inconsistencies in data formats make it difficult to know which data meets certain criteria. And software tools can't determine user-defined data variances. For example, one division of a hardware company logged the sale of a PC, mouse and CRT as a single-unit purchase, while another division logged the sale as a three-unit purchase.
Integration tools can also connect application systems with Web-enabled front ends. These tools allow Web-based systems to trigger one or more back-end transactions via a complex series of message brokers, routers, transformation tools and other software. But legacy architectures were never designed to support seamless transaction flow, and the tools can't fully alleviate this limitation.
Regardless of the near-term value of these integration tools, underlying data and systems will continue to grow more fragmented over time. As this occurs, IT will be required to introduce more layers of technology to support future integration requirements. Eventually, these integration solutions will evolve into an unmaintainable labyrinth of Web-to-legacy interfaces that will stifle future e-business initiatives.
To avoid this fate, look beyond technical integration issues, and address the lack of cohesiveness within the business infrastructures and processes that drive these legacy systems. That attacks the root cause of the e-business integration challenge.
Teams of business-unit and IT professionals should examine e-business requirements from a businesswide perspective. Then they can build a plan to selectively utilize tactical integration tools for the short term, then deploy more long-term systemic solutions. Processes, systems, databases and organizational infrastructures should be integrated and realigned to support ongoing e-business requirements. This might, for example, require consolidating 18 billing systems into three, streamlining billing processes, combining business units and realigning IT support structures.
E-business integration requires solutions that deliver short- and long-term value. IT must work with business units to deploy business-focused integration solutions. In doing so, you'll avoid creating a legacy integration nightmare that could disrupt future e-business initiatives.