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Integration
(in-te-gra-tion)
a combination of parts or objects that work well together
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Software Ecologist Integration Consortium
The Real Silver Bullet
It’s been almost 5 years since Nicolas Carr started a lively (and sometimes hostile) debate with his Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter. And now, just this past fall, Cynthia Rettig added fuel to the fire with her MIT Sloan Management Review paper The Trouble with Enterprise Software. There are indeed serious concerns with the perception of IT and many business leaders are fed up.
For the complete post, check out my Informatica Blog.
Spending money on middleware during a weak economy
I was asked a question recently that got me thinking – “Why would companies want to spend money on middleware during a down market?” My knee-jerk reaction was to recite all the reasons that companies might want to invest in integration technologies in order to get more life out of every IT budget dollar – but then I considered a deeper question.
For the full article, please check out my Informatica blog.
IT Doesn't Matter - Integration Does
Nicholas Carr’s 2003 article “IT Doesn’t Matter” in the Harvard Business Review is still getting attention. I won’t let it drop because the article is based on an incorrect premise and misrepresents the IT challenges that business executives should be aware of. Read the complete post at blogs.informatica.com/enterprise_data_management/2008/03/it_doesnt_matter_integration_d.html.
And thanks to Loraine Lawson from IT BusinessEdge www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/ who reinforces the with her comments:
"I would feel sorry for IT’s favorite punching bag, Nicholas Carr, if he weren’t so pompous and occasionally clueless. Let’s face it: Those are great qualifications for a punching bag."
BEST Architecture Part 8: Business Rules in a Layered Architecture
This is the 8th article related to the BEST architecture. The end of this post contains links to the prior articles.
The BEST Architectural Style prescribes a four-layer architecture:
- User Interface and human workflow layer
- Process management and state engine layer
- Messaging layer that supports request-reply and publish-subscribe
- Business service and application interface layer
In the interests of loose coupling and future organizational agility, it is important to separate business rules into four categories and align them with each of the BEST architecture layers. This is a critical aspect of the BEST architecture which is easily overlooked. If you skip this step, or don’t define the layers, or are unable to maintain the conceptual integrity over the life of the solution, then the ultimate result will be a tightly-coupled and hard to change monolithic system.
Service as Software (SaS)
No this isn’t a typo – I didn’t forget to include a second “a”. Everyone has heard of Software as a Service (SaaS) since it is so hot these days with high profile offerings such as Salesforce.com and successfactors.com. The business model for buying software “on-demand” in increments of one and paying for it on a subscription rather than licensed basis is powerful and is currently seeing tremendous growth. But there is a flip side to the coin where “services” are packaged into software and sold it as a repeatable process; in other words, Service as Software (SaS).
Why you need an ICC
What do Boeing and Citigroup have in common? They both hit the public spotlight in November 2007 with high-profile business problems and senior executive departures resulting from integration challenges.
BEST Case Study #2 - Wells Fargo Home Mortgage
It truly is possible for IT Architecture to enable breakthrough business performance. In September I introduced the BEST architecture and subsequently discovered a real-life case study at Con-way Freight. We now have a second example of BEST that has been documented as a case study from the Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Post Closing business group.
Canonical Best Practices
“Canonical” is a typical IT industry buzzword - it is an overloaded term with multiple meanings and no clear agreement on its definition. My research over the past few months has not been very fruitful in terms of discovering any canonical best practices; if any readers of this blog are aware of any, please comment. In the meantime, this posting introduces three canonical best practices in support of the BEST architecture and the Coupling and Cohesion framework:
- Canonical Data Modeling
- Canonical Interchange Modeling
- Canonical Physical Formats
Message Transfer versus Serialized Objects
There are two basic patterns for triggering state transitions in a distributed computing environment that are not often discussed – Message Transfer and Serialized Objects. This post introduces the concept, and, if you’re still interested after reading it, you might check out Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf or Wikipedia which also offers a perspective on serialization.
BEST Case Study: Con-way Freight
In September I introduced the BEST architecture as an ideal combination of EDA, STP, EBP, SOA (or if you are acronym challenged - Event Driven Architecture, Straight Through Processing, Exception Based Processing and Service Oriented Architecture). Shortly thereafter I met Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect at Con-way Freight, at a conference and discovered that her organization had a perfect case study for BEST.
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