In general, the vast technology landscape, numerous legacy applications, heterogeneous data sources, and changing business environments are continuously adding complexities and challenges to enterprise integration projects in organizations. Although the specific high priority issues vary with the organizations, the following generalized business issues are commonly, frequently confronted by the integration practitioners:
- Complexity: Organizational best practices capable of accommodating the needs of different cultures have been embodied in information systems through complex and dynamic business processes. When different applications are integrated, how to retain different culture-rich business processes within business domain applications in an organization while having them integrated to strive for the overall business goal for the whole organization becomes extremely challenging.
- Diversity: Operational and information needs have been diversified from department to department, facility to facility, and corporate to corporate. This kind of issue is more or less related to the inherent and complex cultural issues. However, from the business perspective the diversity issue in enterprise integration focuses on finding the best approach to support the increased number of roles and responsibilities. Note that the number of roles and responsibilities keeps growing when more and more distributed applications across business domains are integrated as time goes.
- Heterogeneity: Information silos in an organization have been developed using different tools and methodologies over the years. In other words, most likely these information silos are written in different programming languages, run on different operating systems, and communicate over disparate networks. As a result, business data and information supported by these distributed applications readily end up with heterogeneous representations. Technical executions of the enabled computations in these applications in support of business activities across business domains are certainly heterogeneous. Hence, when sharing between applications is needed for coordinating business activities across the organization, a variety of heterogeneity issues definitely arise.
- Scalability: An integrated system has to be scalable in terms of continuously delivering the expected data and information services when the integrated enterprise system and supported business change as time goes. In other words, the integrated system in an organization should be readily scaled up or down when needed.
- Agility: An integrated system to support an operating business has to be flexible, responsive, and adaptable as market demands fluctuate and technologies advance. Technically, the time to make changes in the integrated system should be minimized, so the operating business supported by the system can quickly respond to the market and technical change while still being capable of maintaining high or further improving customer satisfaction levels.
Frequently, the complexity and diversity issues discussed above are operational rather than technical challenges. Technical personnel have to work closely with business analysts, administrative persons, and end users to identify the best solution to tackle them. As there are different integration patterns and technologies available, the grand challenge thus is to identify appropriate integration patterns and technologies meeting the current and future needs for enterprise integration across all the corresponding business units in an organization.
Given the ever-changing business environments and technical challenges of integrating information silos, how to maximally leverage IT investments becomes the ultimate goal of integration practitioners. Consequently, integration practitioners are increasingly paying attention to the following rules of thumb for enterprise integration when working on integration projects in an organization, consistently and continuously striving for increased organizational agility:
- The efficiency and cost effectiveness are the result of the reusability. The following traits or practices should be promoted or applied whenever possible:
- Loose coupling
- Implementation and delivery transparency
- Standardization
- Off-the-shelf solution
- Services most likely come from heterogeneous information systems, which collectively and collaboratively support business operations in organizations. With the fast development of service-orientation design principles and service computing, service-oriented integrations are well-recognized to be cost-effective in resolving the heterogeneous integration issues in the long run.
- Open systems architecture and standard integration technologies become essential for global enterprises to integrate enterprise applications to warrant business successes in the global marketplace.
- Focusing on the potentials of (nearly) real-time computing services in order to improve the organizational business visibility across different facilities
- Providing computing services in a consistent manner nationally and internationally
Meeting different cultural and regulatory needs of different end users, regionally and globally