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Integration #Fail

Integration may not be new, but its role has drastically changed. Once used simply for support, it is now an enabler – serving as an indispensable foundation critical to achieving agility, efficiency, and growth.

Done well, it can drive better business decisions, more cost-effective operations, and be the catalyst for competitive advantage. Architected without a clearly defined strategy, however, integration will fail to deliver on its promise.

What are some of the pitfalls you can avoid when augmenting an existing infrastructure to maximize performance, results, and success? Read on.

#Fail: TractionHow often does the success of an initial integration project fail to gain traction across the enterprise and translate into benefits for the organization at large? More often than it should.

We know why it happens: different lines of business invest at different times for different needs. Big efforts with bigger risks require high-level approvals that can be difficult to obtain. Sometimes the big picture is hard to see. Other times, we simply take what we can get.

Built without clear direction or functional purpose, an infrastructure will be as fragmented as the methodology from which it was assembled and over time, be unable to scale with and meet the needs of an organization as it grows.

If overarching strategy is determined after an architecture is already established, all of the initial expended effort can not only go to waste, but create additional work down the line to modify existing components and reconfigure the application landscape.

Heading off this challenge – and the duplicate overhead cost – requires infrastructure capabilities to be closely aligned with enterprise-level requirements, even in early stages. By thinking ahead and expanding the architecture systematically, you can execute in ways that don’t stall initial efforts, but reduce the likelihood their success will be short-lived and ensure they translate into larger successes for the enterprise.

By thinking ahead and expanding systematically, you can execute in ways that don’t stall initial efforts, but reduce the likelihood their success will be short-lived and ensure they translate into larger successes for the enterprise.

How mature is your integration strategy? Measure it here.

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Tips: Areas to Evaluate• High-Availability and Scalability: Demands on the network can rapidly increase as

enterprise service bus (ESB) adoption rises, more services are deployed, and reach is extended across mobile and B2B channels. What degree of availability, scalability, and support should be anticipated to ensure a consistent end-user experience by employees, partners, and customers?

• Connectivity: Application landscapes can vary drastically across the organization – and change dramatically over time. What degree of connectivity will be required to support existing and future portfolios (incl. mobile, social, cloud)?

• Visibility: As technical issues can impact the business, enterprise services require enterprise-level attention. What level of visibility will be necessary to identify trouble spots before problems become bigger issues?

In #fails that follow, we’ll tackle how organization – people, standards, mandates, and structure – plays a part in integration, as well.

#Fail: StandardsPoint-to-point integration can be a quick fix for getting information from system to system. All it takes is a bit of code and voilà – connection complete!

While this may seem like an efficient way to solve problems in a pinch, it presents long-term risk for the organization. Why? Inevitably a change will be submitted by the business and if the programmer who wrote the custom script is not around, how long will it take to find the keys that unlock the black box?

A single instance might be manageable, but if you’re like most organizations, dozens of hard-coded, point-to-point interfaces run beneath the surface of application development projects. And chances are, developers used different technologies over the years, making it difficult to know where issues lie, let alone what could be causing a problem.

It could take an army to overcome a situation like this on a larger scale, not to mention the escalated cost. So the question becomes: how much of your business’ agility and resources are you willing to put on the line?

Tips: Future-Proofing Your Platform • Stay Open: Standard interfaces allow you to expose the business functionality of

applications without having to understand the complexity of integration logic.

• Keep It Simple: Model-driven, design environments (IDE) deliver visibility into application logic and clearly depict connectivity between your systems and applications. They also make it easier to incorporate or remove components, increasing flexibility of the architecture overall.

• Centralize Control: A bus-based architecture enables you to manage applications from a single platform. Added bonus: when the time comes for inevitable system upgrades, all can be administered through this unified environment – making it easier to scale applications, monitor performance, and ensure availability is never compromised.

The question inevitably becomes: how much of your organization are you willing to put at risk?

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#Fail: LanguageIn a perfect world, systems and applications have no trouble communicating with each other. Able to seamlessly exchange data across platforms and channels, they work in unison to ensure information reaches where it’s needed, processes flow uninterrupted, and quality of service is never compromised.

In our world, things aren’t so simple. Languages and data formats vary widely across the enterprise, making it difficult for systems and applications to interoperate, exchange information, and drive business processes forward. To capture and process data effectively, interfaces must run interference and translate messages as they’re transmitted across the environment.

In point-to-point infrastructures – where one application often requires the use of multiple interfaces – data exchange can be challenging to manage and costly to maintain. A high degree of manual effort is required, ultimately commandeering valuable resources developers could be using to drive business innovation and growth.

Integration can be used to overcome these obstacles in various ways. Eliminating the need to manage multiple interfaces, a unified, bus-based backbone will systematically mediate communication across platforms and channels. Used in conjunction with a service-oriented architecture, the use of existing IT investments and assets can also be optimized.

Properly architected, this approach will provide an efficient and cost-effective way to enhance infrastructure performance, improve process efficiency, and accelerate automation throughput. Easier to manage, it will also free up valuable resources and allow developers to spend more time focusing on efforts that drive greater business value.

While the benefits are proven, it is essential for applications need to bring people together with the information they need in a uniform and consistent manner. In an organization that makes the switch from point-to-point to SOA, this can be a challenge for skilled engineers who routinely resort back to old habits, rather than embrace new, preferred practices.

How can you be sure integration is implemented properly so performance is not jeopardized or exposed to unnecessary risk?

Tips: Enforcing Consistency• Set Well-Defined Guidelines: By outlining how to properly execute ESB

implementation, you can minimize confusion and provide developers with the knowledge to understand why a uniform approach is essential to meeting quality of service standards.

• Appoint a Design-Time, Governance Review Board: Enforce consistent use of standards by requiring all new implementations to be approved during the planning phase (performs best when administered in tandem with an SOA center of excellence). Projects can also be reviewed post-deployment to identify new best practices or methods of improvement.

How can you be sure integration is implemented properly so performance is not jeopardized?

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Empower alignment and smarter technology choices by making all parties aware of the role and impact their decisions play in helping the organization meet its goals and objectives.

#Fail: PeopleIt’s easy to forget that IT initiatives are just as much about people as they are about technology. If buy-in from key stakeholders across the organization is ignored, the walls of resistance will be high, adoption will be low, and efforts will be taken for granted.

It stems from a lack of communication and understanding. When people are unclear on the benefits new technology provides or how capabilities can be leveraged for their projects, they have trouble justifying use.

Stuck in the old paradigm – where value is perceived and measured in narrow terms (i.e. application quantity or budget figures) – people need guidance to understand the big-picture benefits of integration: lower costs, faster deployment of updates, value-add applications.

What they don’t see is the ability to quickly propose new services to customers. They may not readily realize, for example, they can adopt cloud-based systems to increase performance and free up monetary resources by reduced operating expense.

An Integration Center of Competence (ICC) can help bridge the knowledge divide. Independent from procurement, it becomes a business partner by committing to quality of service, rather than focusing on individual projects. This translates into shorter project lifecycles, sustainable latency, and increased performance.

Through education, it facilitates alignment between business and IT and empowers smarter technology choices by making both parties aware of the role and impact their decisions play in helping the organization meet its goals and objectives.

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Tips: Integrating People with TechEliminate Interpretation & Assumptions Keep business and IT users in sync by having both parties follow and operate along a shared implementation process. Doing so will not only help IT understand and execute on what the business wants to achieve, it also helps the business grasp IT’s objectives (i.e. minimizing time and resources for management and maintenance).

A central system of record can be used to support the process lifecycle end-to-end – from business request to service retirement – ensure compliance mandates are enforced, and track authorization along the way. Key stakeholders can also gain visibility into current state, enabling them assess yielded value.

Learn from Experiences, Commit to Decisions Ensure initiatives map to overall strategy by requiring people to identify and outline how new initiatives will deliver on organizational objectives. Inserting this step into the process not only safeguards best practices, it helps shorten project duration and optimize how resources are utilized.

Provide a Capability Catalog Once equipped with best practices, the ICC can look for recurring integration needs. Similar to how ERP is standardized – where a global template enforces compliance yet leaves room for specific, local needs – the same approach can be applied for integration.

A pattern can be used to structure and standardize communication with corporate applications, yet remain flexible to support localized data exchange. The ICC can also offer a catalog of capabilities to supports the deployment of standard applications, or leverage events to identify specific situations.

Having reached maturity, an ICC is proven to ease the expansion of integration across the enterprise and supply business and application teams with a partner to deliver proven capabilities that can be fine-tuned to comply with their needs.

As the pace of our global business landscape accelerates, organizations will need greater flexibility, speed, and access to critical data.

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TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. Whether it’s optimizing claims, processing trades, cross-selling products based on real-time customer behavior, or averting a crisis before it happens, TIBCO provides companies the two-second advantage® – the ability to capture the right information at the right time and act on it preemptively for a competitive advantage. More than 4,000 customers worldwide rely on TIBCO to manage information, decisions, processes and applications in real time. Learn more at www.tibco.com.

©2013. TIBCO, TIBCO Software, and The Two-Second Advantage, are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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What will differentiate leaders from the pack? The advancement of integration with new forms of technology.

#Fail: ProcrastinationWaiting for a big, game-changing enterprise project to sell the idea of integration is risky and damaging for any company. If resources solely focus on keeping the lights running, rather than empowering the organization, new projects are in a prime position to seize their share of the budget. By aligning the architecture with critical systems and procedures and reducing the level of resources required to maintain it, this balance can be inverted.

The longer integration is put off, the more amplified an enterprise will be exposed to risk. And if budget resources are reallocated, you’ll be forced to manage integration on the cheap – resulting in higher costs down the road.

#Fail: New TechnologyWhether it’s connecting different cloud systems, extending data to mobile devices, or driving business processes forward, integration provides the foundation to realizing the speed and flexibility required to succeed in the 21st century. Failing to augment integration capabilities with other forms of technology will not only limit the full potential of the platform, but of the organization as well.

When matched with complex event processing (CEP), for example, value can be amplified. Used together, they enable greater awareness and performance – accelerating the identification of situations that might go undetected otherwise. Extracting actionable intelligence from high volumes of streaming data – enriched by information from anywhere – you’ll gain the ability to get ahead of opportunities and risks, engage with activity in real time as it happens, and respond relevantly to optimize results.

What more could you be doing? Explore your options at www.tibco.com.