Informatica Enterprise Data Management

Integration is a discipline. That is, the task of making independent and autonomous entities work together in a synergistic fashion requires unique skills and practices within the context of an enterprise strategy. You may well ask "isn't integration just the same thing as management?" Not really. Management disciplines are clearly one aspect of an integration discipline, but they are insufficient because of two key characteristics: incompatibility and independence. The variations in data and process definitions across software packages and across organizational groups in combination with the autonomous nature of each link in the flow of data drives the need for a specialized management practice.

The autonomous nature of each link in the chain means that we have limited control of all the elements that make up an end-to-end operation. Clearly we have limited control when we partner with another business in the supply chain and we certainly can't control all the regulatory demands, but surely we have control within our own organization so management practices alone should suffice - but do they? While this may have been true years ago in vertically integrated organizations with more autocratic cultures, times have changed. For starters, many large organizations today operate more like a federation than a dictatorship. And the people that work in the organizations have a mind of their own, come from all over the world (and even work all over the world) and often aren't permanent employees of the company. Traditional management practices are no longer sufficient in this new environment.

Integration is a distinct discipline that seeks to find the optimal balance between efficiency in a complex chain of responsibility while remaining adaptable to change and without stifling innovation at each link in the chain. Integration demands unique practices that build on traditional management practices. For example, integration techniques are often more of an agreement process rather than an analytical process.

Integration as a process can be done manually or with the assistance of technology. The internet is a good example of highly automated integration. A person can connect to the internet, discover an unused website name, register it, and create the website; within a short time search engines will index the new site so that others can find it. Voila - you are in business. All this is done totally automatically without human intervention because of common standards, protocols and languages.

What are implications for individual enterprises? Effective business integration can drive bottom line results and if done well, integration will:

• Lower ongoing costs and one-time initiative costs by reducingduplication and redundancy in systems, data and business processes.
• Reduce time to market for new product introductions by developing standardized business services layer that decouples agile business processes from the underlying technical implementation.
• Drive revenue by allowing individual functional units to innovatewhile still leveraging common shared functions.
• Improve customer satisfaction by providing an integrated view of the customer and increased reliability resulting from a more simplified technical infrastructure.
• Improve the employee's quality of life by reducing frustrations of "swivel chair integration" and providing systems that provide the information they need, when they need it and where they need it to do their work.

While these benefits sound great, there are in fact significant implications for achieving them. At a business operational level achieving these benefits requires:

• New organizational structures and relationships such ascross-functional teams with authority to make trade-off decisions. For example, providing product bundles where individual product managers may see lower margins, but the enterprise overall benefits from increased wallet share.
• Changes to metrics, goals and rewards. For example, when just about any function can be performed in just about any channel, you may need to change incentives to encourage store sales staff to steer customers to lower-cost channels. And you may need to add metrics that track cross-functional sharing and reuse and reward managers accordingly.
• Revamped governance processes for funding of cross-functionalmulti-year initiatives. Single-project and single-iteration budget decisions need to be supplemented with planning and governance that takes a two-to-three-year view of application portfolio upgrades.
• More effective communications between functional groups and across geographic regions. And just as important, a closer ongoing strategic working relationship between business functions and IT functions.
• Common vocabulary for data and business processes to enable one version of the truth. The key to process integration is data standardization. As standardized data are made available, business owners can effectively integrate their processes.
• A 360 degree view of customers. Simplified and personalized presentation is a powerful combination that leads to greater customer loyalty and retention.

For the IT organization the implications are no less significant.

• An integration group is needed which is a permanent part of theorganization.
• A defined application portfolio is required with clear accountability across business and IT functions.
• Strict standards for process and data interactions across applications. While you can continue to allow significant autonomy of decisions within an application domain, the critical nature of how all systems are connected with each other requires tight controls over their interactions.
• The need for an integration methodology in addition to change management and software implementation processes. Integration initiatives must start with a definition of the end-to-end business processes and be based on a common business language.
• Implementation of new technology and tools to enable end-to-end dataintegration.
• Development of staff skills in formal modeling techniques and tools.The skills required to abstract functionality and generalize business concepts for enterprise-wide use are not always common in technical staff and must be developed.
• Standards compliance as a matter of principle rather than a matter of convenience. Standards that support the principle of loose coupling between systems are enablers for an agile business.

These capabilities are enabled by a fundamental understanding that integration is a distinct discipline. Organizations that view integration as a "strategy" and that focus their people, policies and investments around the strategy will have a clear competitive advantage. They will create an agile business where each link in the chain can change and adapt to meet local needs while the end-to-end chain remains strongly aligned with the overall operating model.