Darren Covington
Vice president Asia-Pacific
E2E Technologies
Laurence Cole
Managing director
BEA Australia & New Zealand
Cole
In your view, what do you see as barriers for understanding the importance of market driven integration. (MDI uses direct model execution based on industry standard diagrams, such as unified modeling language or the object management group. It avoids traditional coding or code generation on traditional programming languages and therefore eliminates the time and cost involved in bespoke programming.
Covington
Most people think “this is too good to be true”. Considering the classic gap between marketing and reality, this sort of scepticism is predictable when you look at the benefits of MDI. References (through reports) from the likes of UBS, Agrano or Swisscom are useful to establish the credibility MDI deserves but nothing better underlines the importance more of MDI than doing a real life proof-of-concept using the prospect’s backend systems. Typically, less than a day is enough to know for sure if MDI will add value in a given case.
Covington
Migrating to a new platform always includes a risk for the customer. What do you think are the best ways to mitigate risk in systems migration projects?
Cole
Risk mitigation is all about eliminating the unknown and reducing the size of changes being made to the organisation from an IT perspective. BEA believes that the following top tips reduce business risk when it comes to changes in the IT environment.
1. Take a phased approach. Use service infrastructure tools that let organisations change a piece at a time and so that they avoid migrating all components at once.
2. Train, train, train. And not just product training, although that is important too. Also explain the scope of the project upfront and identify what is proposed and what benefits people will see. Clear strategy and adequate training can mean less problems.
3. Testing. Unit and integration testing with real data and real user profiles is very important because it helps an organisation to significantly reduce implementation risk.
4. Support. Request plenty of IT support, especially during go-live, make sure that support centre is staffed accordingly. It is also important to make sure you have clearly defined escalation procedures in place.
Cole
What is key to a successful MDI strategy?
Covington
What businesses require today is the capability to deploy the IT services they need quickly, easily, and without overseeing the extensive redevelopment work that causes failure of so many integration projects. However, the largest single problem with integration projects is failed communication between the key parties responsible for implementation, namely business leaders and the IT department. It is a well-documented fact that more than half of all systems integration projects take 50 percent longer or deliver 50 percent less functionality than originally planned.
MDI strategies are no different to any other technology programs. To be successful they all require consistent project methodologies that enable clear communication and documentation between both the business and technology. Indeed, MDI works best when both the business and the IT functions clearly define and execute integration requirements based on UML (unified modeling language) models. By generating the integration runtime environment directly from a model, there is no more need for bespoke programming.
A successful MDI strategy will therefore put the communication between business and IT rather
than the technology itself at the centre of attention.
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