Integration Competency Center: An Implementation Methodology

...I own Informatica tools and have personally experienced their value (properly implemented and utilized). However, I was concerned about vendor bias when I bought my copy of this work. Upon completion, it turns out there simply was no bias there. What is there? Pages of well-developed thoughts and practical concepts presented for consumption by novice or architect on what to most is still an evolving discipline. Master these competencies and unlock the benefits of agility inside your enterprise. I just bought four more copies and consider it a must read for my managers. I `want' them to drink this kool-aid...

A straightforward explanation of and good advice on enterprise integration. Integration is as yet poorly understood, but it is the key to agile and aligned organizations. Despite the positioning of large ERP vendors, effective organizations need to share information across applications, and this sharing takes place both within and across organizations. Schmidt and Lyle provide a clear explanation of what an organizational Integration Competency Center should look like and a reasonable way of getting from a center that gathers and disseminates best practices to more advanced approaches that feature shared services, centralized services, and even self service and automated integration. Their insistence that integration is a separate layer and not simply a component or API to an application is a very important point, and one that is not always appreciated. Think of this layer as the structure that makes possible emergent value for an organization by It would have been nice if the authors could have provided more information on certain advanced topics. Treatment of web services, business processes and orchestration is very thin, and these are the emerging value centers for integration. Semantic integration, the future paradigm, receives only cursory treatment. Complex event processing and content integration (which poses separate problems from data integration) are not covered. Still, a must read for anyone concerned with effective enterprise architecture.

I think this book is a fantastic help for anybody from starter to more experienced managers. It gives a very good and structural approach on Competency Centers, and I successfully used it to create a Business Intelligence CC. Many thanks Gwelyn

This was an excellent read and well developed concept. This book can serve as a reference for the aspiring Integration Architect, and those just seeking to broaden their understanding of the complexity involved in integrating systems and data architecture. This is not a "silver bullet" approach - the authors state that it will take years to implement and ICC; further they offer 5 models for building the ICC so that it can be adapted to most organizations. For architects, this offers some great examples and illustrations (a picture is worth lots of words) - my only knock is that these are not available in Visio or PowerPoint for download. For those of you concerned about an Informatica bias or propaganda, if its there, its slight - I do not recall any emphasis saying "use Informatica tools" for this task. This will likely serve as a spring board for additional books on integration in the coming years - it provides numerous concepts, many of which can be expanded upon.