'What Next' for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 1

Factually, that’s the not the most popular question being asked by my clients so far. Potential reason could be that most of the enterprises are still catching up to establish an operational competency center capability. ‘What next’ has been the idea that I have been tossing every year in my mind since last 8 years as far as evolution of competency center is concerned. And I’m sure same had been cases for many more analyst and consultants across the globe. This global appetite to discover ‘what next’ and to materialize it in real life has helped the industry to progressively evolve a concept like Integration Competency Center. Result is that while 8 years back we were exploring the concepts of ICC together with our clients, 5 year back we were driving our clients into ICC and some of our clients were driving challenging ICC designs from us and in recent 2-3 years to our deep satisfaction clients have been demanding transformation to superior ICC designs and we are stretching our abilities/innovation to meet the demands. I believe that global economic dynamics that we are seeing today will soon start pushing the enterprises in medium to long term and in turn driving consultant like us toward ‘what next’ very seriously. So that’s about why I’m writing about it. I will be running a series of blogs on this topic to cover the end-to-end story over a period of time.

Let us come back to this ‘what next’ for Integration competency Centers. Integration competency centers that exist today are varied in their service capacity as well as organizational positioning. These competency centers are somewhat centralized body of service groups with a charter of providing services required for enterprise integration. This group has good subject matter and technology expertise to be able to service enterprise integration specific requirements. Most of the basic processes and guidelines are in place that are used by this factory (another way of looking at ICC) to operationalize the integration life-cycle functions. These competency centers are able to meet the scale and demand of business with good service level performance. So what’s up for these competency centers as next big thing that they are going to transform to?

So as I see, there are set of next-generation views on the horizon:

1. Next generation competency centers will make it lot easier to execute and manage the changes than how it is today. That will transform the role of 'change' from 'threat' to 'opportunity'.
2. High degree of collaboration of the ICC across stakeholders that allows more transparency in the engagement and leads to co-creation of methods of delivery/operation of ICC with stakeholders like business units, application teams etc.
3. Though current ICCs are operational but there is good likelihood of presence of what I call 'eco-system fat' that makes the entire ICC as a organizational system slower, less effective and costly to improve. With current acute economical cost pressures, a system like ICC will need to reduce this fat significantly by adopting lean methods in terms of people, processes, systems etc.
4. Another important shift that can be bring into ICC is clear identification of value added functions and 'operational' functions. This will help, one to automate, standardize and accelerate the operational functions; second it will give opportunity to channel the investments, thought leadership and innovation effort more toward value added functions. One of the strongest feature of such ICC will be availability of 'self-service' capabilities in many facets of the ICC
5. Many of the ICCs don't leverage high-maturity sourcing models. Next-generation ICCs have opportunity to create strong sourcing model to leverage the strengths of SI vendors and drive focus of in-house staff toward more value added contribution. In essence, engagement model of sourcing will shift to 'outcome driven' and not 'activity-driven'.
6. Gainful utilization of the social networking systems like Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs etc. has huge potential to change the face of knowledge management in the ICC.
7. 'First-time Right' effectiveness will become important to ensure that wastage in rework and 'fixing' that should not have been in very first place becomes an important metrics in the ICC.

Now, while these changes might be exciting, they are not very easy to come by. I will start getting into details of these in subsequent blogs. Meanwhile, if readers believe in another other next-generation changes for ICC, I will be glad to hear about that and possibly include it in my subsequent blogs.