Last August I discussed about enterprise application integration to address CEOs challenge and pain points. Simplification and Sustainability were the two major concerns for most CEOs in 2010. I think this issue will remain for the next couple of years until enterprise IT environments are fully integrated. We need to have a single virtualized platform that provides the technical underpinning of the system. This should be architected from the ground up as a modern, open, web services, services-oriented platform. The platform sits on top of the existing infrastructure investments and provides one single solution for any business person. Therefore, the magic word is Integration. Adopting right techniques for the integration will be the key to success in the new economy. Platform requires providing universal capabilities to deliver targeted information to knowledge workers, decision-makers, and other business folks in the organization whenever and wherever they need it. These capabilities enable users across the organization so that regardless of where individuals sit.
Now the challenge is how to make the architecture simple. Most enterprises are struggling to simplify their IT Infrastructure, too many applications, too many systems. Some of them may be redundant. They are not integrated. At the same time business areas trying to unlock the business value of the information for competitive advantage. Business Executives are facing tremendous challenge the information they are getting cannot be trusted because of silos information, or provide miss information due to volume and variety they are having, or reading wrong information due to dynamic nature of the business. Therefore most IT Organizations are facing three major issues:
(1) Applications need to be integrated at enterprise level
(2) Information need to be integrated and consistent throughout the organization
(3) Information must be trusted across the organization
The best way to approach these issues to look into all three problems are at the same time. Because if we visualize a typical information architecture framework we see three unique services we need in the information integration layer to deliver trusted information on a single glass pan and among others services they are:
(1) Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) service,
(2) Enterprise Information Integration (EII) service,
(3) Extract Transform and Load (ETL) service,
and their unique capabilities in combination address those issues.
For application-to-application integration EAI will provide message-based, transaction-oriented, point-to-point or point-to-hub brokering techniques, EII will provide optimized & transparent data access and transformation layer providing a single relational interface across all enterprise data, and ETL will help set-oriented, point-in-time transformation for migration, consolidation, and data warehousing. The common thread “Transformation” related to data may confuse us. But all three are unique and we need to have all three to create a robust platform to address integration of applications, to provide trusted information, and to provide require business intelligence. This will create a robust foundation for Business Intelligence service. Looking only to integrate applications is not the right approach to solve BI issue. Furthermore if we think about the use case for EAI, ETL and EII, we will find they define what they do with the data, how they move it and where, and the structure of the entities they work on. Only EAI or only EII or only ETL cannot support CEO’s objective or solve CEO’s pain points. Moreover you will miss the opportunity to explore EII and ETL scope, and improving the data quality at enterprise level. For detail approach and road map please contact me.
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