TABLE OF CONTENTS Change in any organization can be challenging. This applies to technical and system changes as well. In this chapter, changes in the form of various integration techniques are covered. For each technique, the forces that help and hinder the change are analyzed using a technique called force field analysis. Included in the force field analysis are integration techniques such as adopting enterprise-wide standards, various types of middleware, data warehousing, and message routing.
| Note | My first exposure to attempting enterprise integration came many years ago. I worked for a corporation that decided to standardize on what was called basic business elements or BBEs. Various departments had different definitions for serial numbers, among other commonly used data elements. This was seen as a bad thing that had to be expensive to the corporation. An analogy was made to a discovery that different sheet metal screws were being used to build equipment in different departments when one type of screw could be used almost universally. Buying, inventorying, and using one type of screw actually saved a considerable amount of money. The reasoning, believe it or not, was that if using one type of sheet metal screw across departments saves money, then using one serial number definition across departments should also save money. The intent was good, but of course, a lot of time and money was spent on defining these BBEs. The analysis seemed to go forever. In fact, the use of BBEs never went beyond the analysis stage. |
