Beyond the model
One of the key benefits of devising an ICC is that instead of working in departmental silos you can work across the company to call in top talent for those demanding projects. An ICC can take on the following processes for a project using people dedicated to the task of: administration, architecture, database administration, operation and system administration, quality assurance, business analysis, security, project management and can also include product and application vendors and internal marketing.
Largely ICC projects are driven by the CFO, or CIO in smaller companies, generally who will have responsibility for the outcome of integration (remember that most CFOs now look after much of the commodity of company data). This helps fast-track projects as they already have the support of the higher echelon of the business.
This may seem like a lot of people but the idea is that once the project is rolled out these people will work less and less on it—only those required to maintain the rollout will be needed. Furthermore, as processes become a lot more defined, the ICC can become more streamlined for new integration projects. Companies that may have required 10 people for the first integration could require half that number once they are a few projects in, as much of the groundwork will already have been worked out. (Training for an already installed application or code used for that, for example, will not be required again.)
The four stages of application integration an ICC will deal with, according to Malinverno, encompasses the project from the original justification of the business case to the project’s broader adoption and ongoing maintenance. After proving the business case, those working on the ICC will pilot the project and assess its readiness on building up its team before moving over to the early adoption phase, which will include education and training, failure analysis, process improvement and best practice.
“Most young ICCs centralise integration work for the organisation, leveraging the organisation’s governance policies as much as possible,” Malinverno says. “As ICCs mature the amount of integration work needed and the associated time pressure makes them grow in size.”
By about the middle of the third stage, where early adoption is concerned, the overall size of the Integration Competency Centres is likely to deplete. Staff that do not work full time with the specialised integration team can go back to their jobs elsewhere in the company.
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