Integration Strategy is not a Luxury
The IT community has put up with fragmented information environments for years, but now they are finally putting a spotlight on this critical issue. As IT pursues integration’s Holy Grail, poorly defined requirements and e-business demands are driving companies in a multitude of directions. And multidimentional integration requires a cohesive strategy that can be deployed across and beyond the enterprise.
The demand for integration is exploding. IT wants to integrate applications, data architectures and front-ends. Business units want to integrate workflow, customer and supply chain management. The enterprise requires business unit and EDI integration and everyone wants integration support for their e-business initiatives. Unfortunately, many of these efforts will fail because they lack a clear understanding of integration dependencies as well as a cohesive integration strategy.
Vendor and analyst briefings make it appear as though a magic box can be installed to fully integrate thirty years worth of back-end chaos. You can white wash a rusty car, but it is still a rusty car. Having lived through dozens of failed silver bullet solutions, I believe its going to take more than bailing wire, black boxes and good intentions to bring true integration to the enterprise.
Understanding integration dependencies is essential to building a shared vision of what you want to achieve. Many people feel that back-end infrastructures can remain fragmented while business-to-business integration takes center stage. But just because our collective understanding of integration has been raised to an industry perspective, with e-marketplaces being one example, it does not mean that organizations can ignore internal integration requirements. Fragmented legacy data, inconsistent business rule definitions and redundant organizational infrastructures should be addressed as part of a comprehensive approach or integration efforts will be stymied.
Integration dependencies are similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Just as you cannot achieve self-actualization while hungry or threatened, neither can you fully satisfy external integration requirements when in-house systems are poorly integrated. Similarly, if the organization is unstable, you cannot retool business workflows or data architectures. And if workflow is in flux, it will impede progress on business-to-business efforts. You must assess and address these dependencies as a top integration priority.
By now you may think that I am a killjoy – trying to slow deployment efforts. To the contrary, you should investigate and experiment. Just be sure to build false starts into your plan. Until you address integration dependencies and create a cohesive strategy based on those dependencies, your road to integration will be a rocky one. So gather all relevant and affected parties, create a shared sense of purpose, assess those dependencies and draft a strategy to guide integration efforts across the enterprise and beyond.