It is quite likely that at some point in your IT career you will have heard of the concept of the integration competency centre (ICC)—put in action by Fortune 500 companies from around the world and promoted by all the big vendors. But unless you have worked for a large corporation the concept will have remained just that. But thanks to a growing interest in service oriented architecture (SOA), the greater complexity of application environments and the emphasis now placed on good governance, this could very well be about to change.
The benefits of having an ICC in place have always been there—IDC states in its research that the top performing one third of ICCs will save an average of 30 percent in data interface development time and costs, 20 percent in maintenance costs, and they will also achieve an average of 245 percent reuse in resources used to carry out integration projects.
In the past, these savings have only been reserved for enterprise users but this does not mean the smaller guys should not be keeping a close eye on this concept. Gartner predicts that by the end of this year about 67 percent of very large companies will have an ICC in place, up from about 40 percent at the start of 2005, and by 2010, more than 80 percent will have one. Also by 2010, it predicts more than 50 percent of large companies will have an ICC in place. And this effect will not stop here, according to Sun Microsystems senior director for technical services Ray Gear.
The ICC was born out of a management concept, dubbed the Centre of Excellence. This was widely talked about and adopted in the 1980s, when companies started upholding the best practices of divisions that were clearly performing well, then rolling them out to all other departments. This drove efficiencies and created an overall body of knowledge that could be used across the company as a whole.
Ten years later it has become a staple part of the IT strategy for a number of large enterprises after realising that implementations of complex and individually managed applications, such as enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), were not necessarily going according to plan. The disparate systems would not necessarily talk to each other, due to the different integration setups and processes in place, so their true value was not always being realised when it came to the sharing of data. Worse still, the role of the IT department had become much more complicated with the upkeep of many best-of-breed legacy systems (instead of one standard approach) and disparate views of the businesses’ IT functions.
Vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Informatica, SAP, IBM and more have since jumped on the bandwagon (it is a good way for a vendor to entice a company to use its services for integration projects throughout the company’s lifecycle, and to introduce its technologies to more than one department at a time using the ICC’s desire for standardised applications and processes across the company). These vendors have used many different terminologies to promote the ICC—six years ago you may have known it as strategic and structured application integration, for example. For the purpose of this article we will take Gartner’s approach and coin it the ICC.
Gartner analyst Michael Barnes says the Integration Compentency Centre is really is about looking at integration projects as more than just technological initiatives—an ICC leads integration projects to look more at the business processes that go around such IT projects.
“It’s an initiative that requires an amount of formalised collaboration and communication and the identity and the interaction of a lot of different experts within the organisation,” he says.
Essentially, if you listen to Informatica it is all about creating “rules, schools and tools” to surround your integration projects, so processes can be standardised, methodologies mapped out and knowledge shared by using set integration teams that sit across all business projects, going beyond the traditional IT department. It is like another floating enterprise or department in itself.
“Basically, I think the concept of the ICC is becoming more and more important to everyone who is adopting an SOA approach,” Sun’s Gear says. “So where their strategy is to implement new business solutions using an SOA style, it is important that they have some kind of strategy for governance, and therefore some central capability for delivery and managing these successive implementations because obviously you don’t want to have a proliferation of similar looking services.”
“This can be important for any company, from the medium-size to the very large,” Grear adds.
According to Gartner, service-oriented architecture is a process, or application (depending how you look at it), that allows companies to reuse their existing applications and data to create new business processes. Like the ICC concept, it drives agility by allowing applications to be changed much faster, and it stops the need for code to be rewritten, and for numerous amounts of the same application to be required.
“SOA governance identifies decision-making authority for defining or modifying the business processes that will be supported with SOA techniques, the service levels required, the service performance requirements, access rights and so on,” a Gartner report titled The ICC and SOA Governance by Paulo Malinverno states, adding that having an ICC can make SOA projects much easier to achieve as the processes are already in place to allow good governance.
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