“Growing SOAs will form ICCs in companies that don’t have one,” says Malinverno.
There are many key benefits to be derived by having such a strict way of looking at IT integration. Malinverno has been described as a guru on the concept. He says one of the key benefits of an ICC is that a diverse set of skills, plucked from all business departments, can be brought together for complex projects. This can include application development, architecture, operations, external vendors, business people, security, marketers and administration. “It is a miniature of the whole company, geared to make application integration as fast and smooth as possible. The business value that ICCs return, mainly in terms of quicker time to market and reduction in maintenance costs, guarantees that ICCs are worth the hassle of building and operating them.”
What the users have to say:
“We have put in a proposal to the board [of the university] for an ICC to try and reduce the maintenance cost of our application integration, and obviously take advantage of new technology such as SOA.”
David Saint,Monash University
“The ICC approach ensures that you have a blueprint for design and development before any code is remotely considered.”
David WalkerIntegral Energy
How it works
Overall, there are four different models of an ICC that can be considered. Each of these follows a similar path, the difference is the area in which the ICC will focus on, or what it hopes to achieve and the ongoing resources that will be fed into keeping it running. For smaller companies the desire may be to follow one of these areas and then grow on this. This way, as new projects get underway you can start off forming best practices that can one day be part of a much larger, more complex ICC that oversees much more of the business. You don’t need to have the whole ICC in place to start seeing benefits.
The four models of an ICC (as defined by Informatica, which feeds off of Gartner’s research) are:
• Best practices: This model defines processes for data integration initiatives and recommends technology but does not share the development workload with individual project teams. The focus is on a higher ROI for data integration and other initiatives. Here developed code can be stored for use on future projects but this is all done by a unified, standard team.
• Technology standards: This model looks at bringing in single, unified technology platforms to the business to allow for greater reuse of work and code from project to project. Neither the technology nor people are shared but standardisation creates synergies among disparate project teams.
• Shared services: Here the processes carried out by the ICC are defined, architecture is standardised, and a central team maintains shared work and the integration environment. But most development work is carried out in the distributed lines of the business. This is a way of working to optimise resources by sharing them out during integration.
• Central services: This is the ultimate and most efficient way of operating an ICC. Here standards and processes are defined and technology is shared and a centralised team is responsible for all development work on all integration initiatives.
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