This article is the next installment of the “10 weeks to Lean Integration” series. If you are joining the discussion now, you may want to read previous postings starting with this one which includes links to related articles.

As stated earlier, optimizing the whole requires sub-optimizing the parts. This applies not just to the integration domain, but the enterprise as a whole. For individual teams, or functional groups, to make trade-offs in the interest of the overall enterprise requires a common set of values, mission and goals. To that end, there are several key recommendations for an integration team.

First, focus on the entire value stream rather than unit or functional activities. For example, the integration team at a large bank was chartered to refactor a number of legacy middleware systems in the interests of reducing operational costs, simplifying the environment to accelerate change, improving throughout, and reducing production incidents. The team could have used these as measures of success, but instead they decided to link the project success to how satisfied bank customers were despite the fact that a) the integration systems were one or two degrees removed from directly impacting end-customers, and b) there were many other factors beyond integration systems which arguably have a much bigger impact on customer satisfaction. Nonetheless, since the integration systems played a critical role in delivering data quickly and reliably to ATM’s, the website, teller workstations and call center staff, the team considered it important to keep the end-customer in mind. The effect of using this metric is that the rest of the organization rallied around to help the integration team achieve the results because everyone had an interest in improving customer satisfaction.

Second, deliver a complete solution. By complete we mean not just delivering the integration software components, but also understanding how any immediate changes play a role in the end-to-end data flows, how overall performance will be impacted, how the components can be changed over time, how the operations of the system can be monitored and controlled effectively, and how the capacity can be monitored and planned to ensure sustainable throughput.

Third, choose appropriate metrics to maintain a focus on the big picture and develop an engaged and collaborative extended team. The core concepts are to select a few broad-based holistic measures rather than many narrowly focused metrics. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t measure detailed activities in all areas and all steps of the process – to the contrary, these detailed measures are necessary for data collection in support of continuous improvements. But these detailed measures should not be used to incent or motivate individuals or teams, but rather as inputs for a data-driven improvement process. Instead, three overarching integration metrics may be all that is needed.

1. Cycle time of total project implementation – from concept to deployed solution.
2. Business value which may be financial measures such as operational cost or sales revenue, but could be any other metric which is meaningful from a business perspective.
3. Net Promoter Score which is a measure of customer satisfaction. This could be an internal metric for an integration team that has multiple internal customers or could refer to the external customer of the enterprise. The Net Promoter Score is a measure developed by Fred Reichheld in The Ultimate Question(1) which describes a formula for subtracting the number of dissatisfied customers from delighted customers to end up with a net score on a scale of 0 to 10.

Next week this series continues with a discussion of W. Edwards Demming and his original 14 key principles for effective business management – and how they apply to the realm of integration.

1. Fred Reichheld, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

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