Over the course of the last 5 years, I have worked extensively with a number of our “enterprise” customers as they’ve planned, implemented and managed an “ICC” or Integration Competency Center. This approach first came to my attention when I was parachuted in to identify reasons why one group within a Fortune 25 company was fabulously successful with our technology and right next door another team within the same company was struggling with missed timelines and poor adoption. As it turned out, the fundamental problem was not technology related but in the difference in implementation skill and best practices knowledge between teams. Fortunately, the political landscape was such that the successful team was elevated to “lead” status and brought to bear on a broader scope. Thus, one of the first Informatica-based ICC’s was born. As it turns out, many companies face similar challenges in delivering value through their integration efforts. Due to varying skill levels, investment in training, correct selection/use of technology, expertise of implementation partner, political alignment across groups, some projects are successful and others aren’t. And many times this can occur within the same, silo’ed division!
At the micro level, it may appear to be a daunting task to move up and above your particular project to a broader, ICC scope. This process can be a lot of “night-job” work. But it starts from success within your own domain. I’ve seen most successful ICC’s emerge from the efforts of a few within project teams that spend the time to plan, document, and measure/advertise success up the management chain. If you’re interested, more research, best practices and peer successful information are available. The “Integration Consortium” is a standards body that has documented methods and processes to best implement integration on a broad scale. Informatica has documented several examples of success ICC’s at varying levels of depth, of which several were presented at InformaticaWorld in May.
I’d love to hear thoughts on your ICC or the challenges you face in getting started.
