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The Power of Community

The Integration Consortium (IC) is encouraging its membership base to embrace the community approach.  Many vendors including SAP have created large communities where both employees and clients interact through wikis, blogs, forums, and surveys.

Schmidt points out, “The power of community - is how communities on the global scale can create economy... it's almost like enabling outsourcing at the individual level.”

Web 2.0’s emphasis on user created content allows global communities to form quickly.

IT practitioners are, “leveraging things like wikis, blogs, and other events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals... to extend their network of peers outside the four walls of their company, so really, there are no walls -- anybody in the world could be interacting. And they're taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

One of the IC’s main goals is to encourage and facilitate the continued development of the integration community.

The Community Around SOA

Schmidt went on to describe the specific community around SOA.  The Integration Consortium is fostering the community surrounding SOA by enabling sharing of best practices via papers, conferences, and webinars.

Any SOA solution is dependent on best practices and a community approach is the most efficient means of sharing and developing best practices.

The IC is not only facilitating individual community involvement, but also helping community organizations develop.  The IC is one of the founding organizations that helped launch the SOA consortium, which was a spin-off from what was previously known as the SOA Alliance.

The IC also works collaboratively with many groups.  One example is the Synergy Project, a joint project of the OMG, the Open Group and the Integration Consortium.  Schmidt says, “It’s really trying to rationalize our model, to figure out how MDA, model-driven architecture, which is an OMG practice, aligns with and performs with TOGAF which is The Open Group’s architecture framework.” 

The IC brings end-user perspective to the project facilitating a true community wide approach.

Architecture is an Important Aspect of Integration

The IC is also emphasizing architecture’s role in integration.  In the past, architecture was not viewed as an important aspect of integration.  Today, the IC encourages its members to consider architecture as an integral aspect of integration.

Schmidt says, “Integration and architecture have always been two sides of the same coin. Architecture is a lot more about structure, frameworks and standards, while integration is more about the implementation and execution side of the challenges and how can large organizations effectively share information in processes in a consistent fashion.”

Schmidt continues,  “Integration at a business level is really just about getting people to communicate, sharing information across functional areas, serving customers consistently across channels and, in that context, architecture is just as important as the actual Middleware components or software tool they might use to implement it.”

Taking a Holistic View of the Enterprise

While integration projects have a historically high rate of failure, Smith believes there are ways to simplify the process.

“We need to look at our enterprises as a system of systems... while a specific organization may have 1000 or 2000 application systems, they're all connected. They all run in the same network. They're all sharing information. They're all serving the same customer.”

This holistic view enables truly effective modeling, Schmidt says, “We take this incredible high complexity that exists in today's IT world, break it up into manageable functional components through a disciplined process and through standard architectures, define how those components can come back together and play in an end-to-end business process world.”

The IC believes proper modeling based on a holistic view of an organization coupled with community based best practice development will increase the success rates of integration projects.

The Annual Global Integration Summit takes place May 14-15 in Banff,

This event covers a wide range of topics and draws exceptional practitioners from around the world.  The summit is unique in its academic based peer-review process.

Schmidt says, “The peer-review process has generated a very high-quality event. The Conference proceedings book is probably one of the only, if not the only, peer-reviewed business-oriented journal that is published on an annual basis in the integration and architecture space.”

The conference offers a variety of content.  For example, collaborative work analysis, partnering, case studies of real-life implementations, emerging architectures, etc.

The IC will continue its work after the Global Summit.  Schmidt says, “We're taking portions, or kind of a lighter-weight version of the Global Summit, out on the road. Some of the cities that it will be in include Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, New York, Atlanta and this year we're also doing one in Brussels, in combination with the OMG.”

For more information visit:  www.integrationconsortium.org

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