In last week’s blog I posed the question “What is the NEXT BIG THING?” in integration and reviewed the history of silver bullet solutions including OOD (Object Oriented Development), middleware technology and SOA.

While each of these technological advances enabled significant progress, the weren’t the promised silver bullets and the major integration challenges are still with us. So what IS the next big thing? Several readers offered their input last week.  Here now is my answer.

The answer is that the integration challenge is fundamentally not just about technology.  While technology is indeed needed to address the massive volumes, exponential complexity and constant change in data exchanges, technology alone is not the solution.  We need to address the people, process and policy issues as well – and we need to do it in a sustainable fashion and not just for one project at a time.

Those of you who have read my writings before know where I am going with this.  Integration Competency Centers were the first wave of best practices to address the non-technology issues.  The ICC book that David Lyle and I wrote in 2005 described how organizations could treat integration as a competitive differentiator by establishing cross-functional competencies in areas such as data quality management, metadata management, modeling management, middleware systems management, integration methodology, information architecture, financial management, and business process management.

For example, financial management competencies address how to establish enterprise policies and processes for cross-functional financing and accounting of shared infrastructures.  Having the right financial model that supports not just capital investments, but also deals with the ongoing evolution and continuous improvements of shared processes and data is a key element of sustainable integration.  Once again, technology can support the practices, but this is fundamentally not a technology issue.

So are ICC’s the “next big thing”.  Maybe, but I think the best practices are still evolving and maturing so we’re not quite there yet.  I am however very hopeful, and excited, about the next wave of practices that should take the ICC (or CoE) concept to the next level – Lean Integration.

One reason that Lean is so powerful is that it has matured over the past 50 years – so it is now a well-established and proven set of practices that provide sustainable competitive advantage for those that commit to its core principles. Furthermore, as it turns out, I have actually been using many of the Lean techniques for years – I just didn’t know it until recently when I studied Lean in more detail.

The power of Lean is that it provides a repeatable (i.e. teachable) methodology for sustainable integration. For further details, you can read my blog series 10 Weeks to Lean Integration, or better yet, if you attend the Global Integration Summit in Las Vegas on June 3-4, you can see my presentation on the topic and we can talk about it.

In summary, I predict that the Next Big Thing in the evolution of integration centers around non-technology issues and more effective business alignment – and Lean Integration is the leading contender for sustainable best practices.