The first webinar in Candle Corporation’s new ebizQ series, Infrastructure Management: Strategies and Best Practices goes back to basics. Managing A Successful Integration Project spotlights the highlights of organizing and conducting integration efforts in an enterprise.

Gartner Research Director Jess Thompson said his firm separates such efforts into four distinct phases: Planning and Justifying (making the business case, selecting the technology, and providing a proof of concept); the Pilot (first project meant to move into actual production); Early Adoption (includes proliferation, advocacy and education); and Broad Adoption (when integration is everywhere, the IS organization is mature, and metrics are firmly established).

Thompson chose to focus on the pilot project phase, a major part of which involves “formulating the best practices and the team necessary to successfully move on with application integration.”

Pilot projects much be chosen with care, and Thompson explained how to hit a sweet spot that balances reward and risk with performance, scalability and support of the business vision and needs.

“Some organizations make the mistake of trying to make the pilot project seem especially convincing by having it be terribly complex,” noted Thompson, who cited the example of one company that tried to deploy 77 interfaces in an ERP project.

“There’s a big chance of a project like that going up in flames, especially when you’re unfamiliar with using the technology to implement the interfaces and your organization is inexperienced in general,” he observed. Smaller-scale, three-to-six month projects are preferred.

Thompson offered a Gartner checklist to help enterprises assess whether they’re ready to start a pilot project. Among the items: having a vision of the benefits the application middleware will provide, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the selected middleware, having a developed business case and proof of concept, benchmarking to assure support for anticipated message volumes, and strong in-house system administration and configuration skills.

Thompson explained the advantages of having an “Integration Competency Center” that eventually becomes a nexus of support between the architecture group and project teams.