This blog is about delivering business excellence and operational efficiency through integration competency center models and about topics of SOA, Integration in the enterprise context.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

"What's next" for integration competency centers? - Part 3

Next in the next-generation strategy kit is: “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”.

Basic premise for this view-point is the evolution of the working model for ICC. A typical model for shared services has ‘close door’ system or ‘black box’ system. It means that for rest of the organization, this shared services engagement is only for the delivery of service outcomes. For rest, ICC manages internally. It worked fine during early phase of the evolution of this system since it brought relief to other dependent parties from headache of managing variety of matters; now they could just focus on the outcomes from this shared service. But today, this black box is limiting the overall capability of the organization to innovate and improve

With advent of modern social networking and collaboration practices (like wiki, blogs etc.), possibilities of innovation has gone multi-fold. How to leverage the talent, ideas and learning across the organization in integrated manner, that’s the focus of this point.

As I see, going forward..Continue reading the blog...

BPM and application eco-system based integration platforms

Finally organizations are coming to the terms of reality of multiple-integration platforms in their landscape. There was a time in not so distant past when clients were thinking to have a single middleware, struggling to migrate all the legacy of their enterprise on the so called ‘middleware of strategic choice’ (whatever it would have been for them at that point in time) and spending great deal of time and money in this process. Some managed to do, others got stuck in the time warp of technology evolution. And equally for those who managed to do it as well as who got stuck, time did the trick and soon the definition of the ‘middleware of strategic choice’ changed. It meant, those in the good feeling of ‘done with it’ have to again break their head to move the new legacy to the future platform. Those who were stuck it changed the to-be picture from one middleware to other and they were still stuck in their mess. Now what is happening is slightly more realistic and practical I guess. There are two key trends I can see:

Continue reading the blog...