Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Do you need an Integration Competency Center?



Having worked on Tibco product development, and extensive solution deployment, I found that an integration governing body is needed for implementing the "right integration solution". Given the complexity of integration solutions and the amout of energies that need to be spent for connecting to various end points, without a doubt I have doubts that anyone would say no for an Integration Competency Center established to leverage and exploit the integration infrastructure. As there are number of projects that are rolled out in the enterprise the more the need for ICC.

The following picture is from one of the whitepapers that I have written during my tenure at Aalayance Inc., . This indicates what makes a good case for ICC to be established.

However this picture would not give any information as how one could determine whether an enterprise needs a competency center or not. This thought has been lingering in my mind for so long and based on the 20 odd integration deployments and strategies that I have put together all through, I tried to abstract the criteria based on which one can tell with a good amount of confidence whether an ICC is needed for an enterprise or not.....


The above depicted tool can be used to score against each of the criterion and then if the total score is >24, the enterprise definitely needs an ICC, if it is <20>

Note:----This above depicted model needs to be used with other dimensions to accurately determine the Fit-Gap analysis. Aalayance Inc., specializes in doing the same, and we used the same model that was extended multi-dimensionally and used rigoruosly during implementations by Aalayance Inc., [www.aalayance.com]