Lean Integrations: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility

Description

Lean Integration is an excellent resource for anyone struggling with the challenges of performing integration for a complex enterprise.

 - Steve J. Dennis, Integration Competency Center Director, Nike

Use Lean Techniques to Integrate Enterprise Systems Faster, with Far Less Cost and Risk

By some estimates, 40 percent of IT budgets are devoted to integration. However, most organizations still attack integration on a project-by-project basis, causing unnecessary expense, waste, risk, and delay. They struggle with integration hairballs: complex point-to-point information exchanges that are expensive to maintain, difficult to change, and unpredictable in operation.

The solution is Lean Integration. This book demonstrates how to use proven lean techniques to take control over the entire integration process. John Schmidt and David Lyle show how to establish integration factories that leverage the powerful benefits of repeatability and continuous improvement across every integration project you undertake.

Drawing on their immense experience, Schmidt and Lyle bring together best practices; solid management principles; and specific, measurable actions for streamlining integration development and maintenance.

Whether you're an IT manager, project leader, architect, analyst, or developer, this book will help you systematically improve the way you integrate - adding value that is both substantial and sustainable.

Coverage includes

* Treating integration as a business strategy and implementing management disciplines that systematically address its people, process, policy, and technology dimensions
* Providing maximum business flexibility and supporting rapid change without compromising stability, quality, control, or efficiency
* Applying improvements incrementally without Boiling the Ocean
* Automating processes so you can deliver IT solutions faster - while avoiding the pitfalls of automation
* Building in both data and integration quality up front, rather than inspecting quality in later
* More than a dozen in-depth case studies that show how real organizations are applying Lean Integration practices and the lessons they've learned

Visit integrationfactory.com for additional resources, including more case studies, best practices, templates, software demos, and reference links, plus a direct connection to lean integration practitioners worldwide.

CONTENTS:

List of Figures and Tables xv

Foreword xix

Preface xxiii

Acknowledgments xxvii

About the Authors xxix

Introduction xxxi

Part I: Executive Summary 1

Chapter 1: What Is Lean Integration and Why Is It Important? 3

Constant Rapid Change and Organizational Agility 5

The Case for Lean Integration 9

What Is Integration? 11

Integration Maturity Levels 14

Economies of Scale (the Integration Market) 16

Getting Started: Incremental Implementation without Boiling the Ocean 20

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Lean 23

The Lean System 29

The Lean Practices 34

Lean Application Trends 41

Case Study: The Value of Lean in Service Industries 44

Chapter 3: The Integration Factory 45

What Is an Integration Factory? 46

The Integration Factory as an Element of an ICC 52

How Does the Integration Factory Work? 55

Integration Factories as Self-Service ICCs 64

Focus on the Customer 70

Chapter 5: Continuously Improve 89

Chapter 6: Empower the Team 103

Optimize the Whole Rather than Optimize the Parts 132

Chapter 8: Plan for Change and Mass-Customize 145

Pitfalls of Automation - Building Stuff Faster 164

Two Areas of Quality: Data Quality and Integration Quality 182

Part III: Implementation Practices 203

Chapter 11: Financial Management 205

Activities 256

Chapter 13: Metadata Management 281

Chapter 14: Information Architecture 301

Data-in-Motion Models 324

Service-Oriented Architecture Can Create a New Hairball 336

Chapter 17: Integration Systems 361

Law #1: The Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts 395

Common Acronyms 399