Originally appeared in MSI Magazine
September 1, 1999

Integrating Expectations

The integration mantra has been closely associated with competitive edge in manufacturing for well over a decade. During that time, only the labels have changed.

It began during the late 1980s with the push toward “Class A MRP.” A few years later, that was superceded by Enterprise Resource Planning, which extended the concept beyond the four walls of the plant to the rest of the enterprise. ERP may have streamlined the back office, but in the past few years we’ve learned that it takes other tools and approaches to deal with front office functions like customer care.

With the rising fortunes of the Aribas, i2s, and Siebels of the world has come the realization that there must be a better way of integrating them than point-to-point interfaces. Enter the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) provider. More recently, the EAI battle cry itself has been subsumed by the latest corporate fad of emulating the “dot coms.” The theory? Behind every e commerce site should lie an unbroken link to systems, front office and back office alike. Your order entry folks shouldn’t be caught dead rekeying data off your e commerce website into your transaction systems.

While the names of integration solutions have changed with the times, the goals and challenges have remained surprisingly constant. We recently studied over 15 EAI projects, and found that many of the same trials and tribulations from ERP implementations were being repeated.

For instance, the realization that EAI requires cultural buy-in shouldn’t be any surprise to ERP veterans. As one CrossWorlds customer put it, “Now we have the bigger problem of how to align business processes, and that's more difficult than technology,” should have a pretty familiar ring. Theoretically, the hurdle should have been simpler the second time out. Yet, if your organization had a hard time getting operations and finance groups on the same page, try extending that to the sales and marketing folks. Hopefully, getting consensus on defining business entities such as “ex-customers” will hopefully not degenerate into an exercise that analyzes the inadequacies of your sales organization.

Not surprisingly, money works wonders with cultural inertia. “We had all these laws and business requirements that transcended agencies,” said the chief technology officer for a large state government, which was implementing Candle’s Roma messaging integration engine. But, as more state agencies were going on-line, they began realizing the escalating costs of having each reinvent the same basic processes, such as credit card authorizations. “We realized that we needed a service-oriented architecture that could cut across all the stovepipes,” said the CTO.

Sound familiar? Here's more. “The biggest problem was data synchronization and data ownership,” according to an EAI project manager who was building a large performance operations management reporting system linking SCADA (supervisory control), LIMS (laboratory information management), human resources, and financials. The EAI project uncovered significant areas of data duplication and overlap. Yet, because many EAI projects are not always driven by reengineering mandates like ERP, getting those issues resolved can be even more daunting.

How about technology awareness? During the heyday of ERP, it was the challenge of getting developers up to speed on the new event-driven visual programming techniques that leveraged the flexibility of client/server architectures. Fast forward to EAI projects, and the challenge has shifted to learning object-oriented technology. It’s simply impossible to configure the message brokers, that provide the underlying communications for many EAI tools, to work using conventional procedural code. There isn’t enough time in the millennium for your development team to write subroutines to cover all the possible permutations in the way that business processes are routed from one application to the next.

But old habits die hard, according to an EAI project manager from the financial industry, who suggests that you should lead by example. “You need a guru on your team who understands events, and understands objects,” he said.

So call it enterprise integration, e commerce alignment, or devise a sexy new acronym. The process of translating these visions to reality doesn’t necessarily have to become brain surgery. Instead, look back and see how your organization handled matters as prosaic as defining inventory status. After well over a decade of experience integrating the enterprise, we’re certainly older and hopefully wiser.