Integrating Islands with Landmasses

EAI notes and thoughts

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Are ICCs really successful?

Amidst widespread hype about the success of Integration Competency Centers (ICC), I have been hearing rumours of the proving to be costly in at least two of the clients with whom I was/am associated with. Aside from cost (inspite of offshoring), the other reason that is spoken against the ICC is inflexibility in terms of accepting and executing requirements. This reason in most cases is true and could be explained as follows:

Choice of Integration Tool
These days the EAI tools predominantly focus on realtime transactions and process integration. Many organizations think that they are ready for realtime process integration while a deeper insight into their functioning show that they are not. This is because most of their business processes are designed to be batch oriented and changing them would have a huge impact with adverse effects. Most of the EAI requirements center around data integration levels and only require the tool to move data across systems. Thus the EAI tool in most cases, is not fully effective.

ERP Solution Centers and Process Integration
The next problem is that when an EAI tool, whose general definition is to do data integration tries to get into ERP space for process integration, it is definitely frowned upon. The ERP solution centers that manage business processes as a core functionality see this as an invasion into their space and friction is bound to develop.

Scarcity of Skilled EAI Resources
The problem with getting EAI skilled analysts and developers is bigger than ever before with more and more companies waking up to EAI. A fallout of this is that resources act high-handedly, dictating terms to prospective employers and demanding exorbitant salaries. And surprisingly, most of them are folks with just an year or so on a single EAI tool. More often than not, they fair poorly on the job as they are more of "button pushers" or "machine operators" with hardly any knowledge of EAI concepts and paradigms.

So, where does that leave us?
It may so happen that there are no concentrated competency centers doing integration anymore. Folks on a project could just double up as EAI developers as per the project requirement. This would serve to alleviate the resourcing problem and a more informed decision on the integration tool could be made as the project resources would be the ones closest to the functional requirements.

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