For some time now, I've heard consultants and analysts propose launching "centers of excellence" or "competency centers" to better manage newer IT initiatives such as SOA is one that has been proposed by consultants for some time now. Not only does such a body help kick-start SOA efforts in the business, but it's also a way to keep such efforts above organizational politics and fiefdoms. The SOA effort can proceed without being encumbered by individual department or management agendas.
Excellent idea. However, such efforts have been slow to evolve, and may be difficult for smaller to medium-size businesses to get in place. ebizQ's recent survey on SOA governance, conducted in partnership with SAP, found that only nine percent of respondents had established some form of competency center/center of excellence to promote and keep SOA efforts on the right track. Almost all of these were larger companies with revenues exceeding $1 billion or more annually. (Our Webinar on the survey results can be viewed here.)
While getting management to commit time and resources to an SOA center in and of itself may be an uphill battle, there may be value in extending the reach of such centers to enterprise data integration as well, according to John Schmidt, VP of Informatica and Chair of the Integration Consortium. This center may be described as an "Integration Competency Center," or ICC. In a chat with Beth Gold-Bernstein, Schmidt provides some guidelines to help businesses of all sizes implement an Integration Competency Center (ICC). He describes the elements that go into an ICC:
Financial management: "The ICC operates as a shared service. This is a set of best practices around charge back for shared infrastructure and individual services."
Architecture: "The ICC does not do enterprise architecture, but is responsible for the information architecture. They work with the enterprise architecture group, and 'connects the dots,' by mapping schemas to physical data sources to enable the translation, transformation, and integration. This ICC is the central federated repository."
Business Process Management. "This is not BPM per se, but this includes service flow modeling, information flows, business event modeling, and common definition of business events."
Integration methodology: "The process of running an ICC, defining it, organizing it, all the things you need to run an integration group, and how it will interact with other IT groups."
Metadata management: "The ICC group is responsible for data assets. Metadata ends up being a federated model."
Modeling management: "This includes techniques around canonical data modeling, what are the best practices, how do you build them."
Integration Systems. "This is about running integration systems as a specific class of applications – all the discipline of how your manage, plan and operate the system."
_____________________________________________________________________
Leave a comment