Category Archives: Integration Competency Centers
Seven Essential Best Practices For Data Center Consolidation
Data center consolidation is much more than physical movement of servers and infrastructure. In fact, the facility costs and power savings are just the tip of the opportunity. The biggest benefits come from using the consolidation initiative as a catalyst to rationalize the application portfolio, archive inactive data and establish one version of the truth for the data that is left. (more…)
Whose Fault Is The Integration Hairball?
The integration hairball is a pattern that is repeated over and over again in virtually every organization. The hairball is characterized by an overly complex collection of dependencies between application components that is hard to change, expensive to maintain, and unpredictable in operation.
I have used the graphic below since 2001 to present a visual image of the hairball. It shows a collection of enterprise applications as boxes with lines representing the information exchanges between them. I use this picture as an example of an anti-pattern whenever I present to audiences of IT professionals about Lean Integration or ICCs. As soon as the image flashes up on the screen, the first reaction I get – anywhere around the world – is “how did you get a picture of our environment”. (more…)
Loose Coupling Nirvana – Canonical Techniques Part 2
To continue from my prior blog article on this topic, loose coupling between applications in an enterprise portfolio is an IT architect’s dream. If two or more applications are tightly coupled, then it becomes impossible to change or enhance one without impacting the other. Loosely coupled applications on the other hand can be enhanced independently with little or no impact on other systems. The net result is the ability to rapidly change the IT portfolio in response to business opportunities. In short, organizational agility becomes a competitive weapon. But is this dream achievable or is it only wishful thinking? (more…)
Zombies! Yes, They Are Real and Lurking Everywhere
Zombies are pretty big in Hollywood these days. The movie Zombieland was a huge box office success and taught us some valuable lessons for surviving when zombies take over the world. There were over 30 rules revealed. My two favorites were: 1) Good Cardio – to outrun zombies and 4) Doubletap – shoot a zombie twice to make sure they are done.
Surprisingly, the movie never talked about ZOMBIE WORKFLOWS!!!
(more…)
Keeping Your MDM Initiative Lean
Human behavior studies show that if you are offered a pizza menu with a number of combination offerings as well as “build it yourself” options, you will order more toppings than if presented with a menu that only presents build it yourself. The same thing for medical tests – if a doctor is presented with a pre-filled in menu of recommended clinical tests for specific diseases (and the option to strike out tests that are not needed) they order more tests than if presented with the same order form but with nothing checked in advance. So what is the relevance for Master Data Management (MDM)? (more…)
Four Canonical Techniques That Really Work (Or Not)
Several years ago I had the fortunate opportunity to participate in a post-mortem study of a $100 million dollar project failure. No one likes to be associated with a project failure, but in this case it was fortunate since the size of the write-off was large enough that it forced the team to take a very hard look at root causes and not just do a cursory analysis. As a result we finally got to the heart of a challenge that has been plaguing data architects and designers for 20 years – how to effectively use canonical data models. (more…)
Who’s Fault Is It If Your Integration Factory Is Not Performing?
The CIO of GT Inc. (the fictitious name of a real company) met with his middleware vendor rep to deliver some depressing news.
“We established an outsourced factory delivery model two years ago using the productivity tools that you sold us and we made it our enterprise standard. The factory results however, are discouraging use of your integration platform. Projects are not getting approved by the business because of high costs, or else project teams are working around the standard and building hand-coded solutions. Did I make a mistake in buying your software?” (more…)
Effective Data Management Strategies for Solvency II Compliance
Recent announcements by the European Parliament to delay Solvency II implementation deadlines to 2014 are in the headlines as European insurers are seen as being ill-prepared for the minimum capital requirements that will be brought in by Solvency II regulation. A big reason for this stems from the data requirements and challenges companies face to ensure proper regulatory reporting and accurate risk calculations to guarantee compliance.
Complying with Solvency II has the same level of data challenges as did Basel II in the global banking industry as insurers set out to improve how they monitor and measure risk. Many are investing in risk scoring systems, data warehouses, business intelligence, and analytic applications to support their needs. Unfortunately, years of standalone business units, legacy underwriting, policy management, claims, and pricing systems, lack of proper technology to integrate, govern, and share critical data present critical business issues may further delay companies from meeting even these new deadlines. (more…)
Are Function Points Useful For Data Integration?
Why does one software project cost twice as much as another? Is it because it is developing twice as much functionality as the other? If you contract with two system integrators, how can you tell which one is more productive? In a multi-year outsourcing arrangement, is your supplier getting more or less efficient year over year?
An enduring challenge in the software industry is establishing a standard unit of measurement that expresses the amount of business functionality in a given information system so that questions like these can be addressed. Most organizations have not adopted a formal measure, but of those that have, the most widely accepted measure is function points which were defined by Allan Albrecht in 1979[1]. But are function points an effective metric for integration projects? (more…)
Is IT Ready for Self-Service?
In response to a recent post where I suggested that Integration is a good place to start your self-service journey, readers responded with questions about whether IT is ready. Here is one of the comments: “For self-service to be successful requires the company to have the correct level of maturity both on the business and IT side, the correct structure and governance in place and an entity dedicated to guiding and promoting the organizations integration efforts.” (more…)
Loading ...