Product Description

In this groundbreaking book, Lyle and Schmidt highlight the significant benefits IT organizations can realize by adopting a more centralized integration approach, gaining efficiencies and cost savings that ultimately can translate into a corporate competitive differentiator. Describing the various "flavors" of an ICC that can be adopted by companies depending on their needs, Lyle and Schmidt then lay out a best-practices approach to implementing a centralized integration model—from assigning the right people, to determining processes and selecting the best technology.

This is a must-read book for any IT organization seeking to maximize their IT investments for business advantage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254363 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 153 pages

About the Author
John Schmidt is President of the Integration Consortium, a nonprofit organization promoting integration best practices. Mr. Schmidt has practiced as an information systems professional for 28 years and has experience in a wide range of industries, including retail, communications, and banking, as well as education and government. He has a record of consistent leadership in breaking new ground and driving business results. Mr. Schmidt is a frequent speaker on the topic of integration and has written a number of articles on the subject.

David Lyle is the vice president of product strategy at Informatica, where he leads Informatica’s research on model-driven architecture as it extends to integration automation. During the early to mid-’90s, Mr. Lyle worked as a data warehousing consultant on several large-scale, massively parallel warehouse projects. From this experience, Mr. Lyle helped found and grow Influence Software from 1996 to 1999 as a pioneering company in! the development of analytic applications. Informatica bought Influence in 1999 and since then, Mr. Lyle has helped expand Informatica’s data integration platform and metadata technologies, creating several patent-pending technologies for the company.

Customer Reviews

Architecture 101 for Integration
This was an excellent read and well developed concept. This book can serve as a reference for the aspiring Integration Architect, and those just seeking to broaden their understanding of the complexity involved in integrating systems and data architecture. This is not a "silver bullet" approach - the authors state that it will take years to implement and ICC; further they offer 5 models for building the ICC so that it can be adapted to most organizations.

For architects, this offers some great examples and illustrations (a picture is worth lots of words) - my only knock is that these are not available in Visio or PowerPoint for download.

For those of you concerned about an Informatica bias or propaganda, if its there, its slight - I do not recall any emphasis saying "use Informatica tools" for this task.

This will likely serve as a spring board for additional books on integration in the coming years - it provides numerous concepts, many of which can be expanded upon.

Integration drives IT value creation
A straightforward explanation of and good advice on enterprise integration. Integration is as yet poorly understood, but it is the key to agile and aligned organizations. Despite the positioning of large ERP vendors, effective organizations need to share information across applications, and this sharing takes place both within and across organizations. Schmidt and Lyle provide a clear explanation of what an organizational Integration Competency Center should look like and a reasonable way of getting from a center that gathers and disseminates best practices to more advanced approaches that feature shared services, centralized services, and even self service and automated integration.

Their insistence that integration is a separate layer and not simply a component or API to an application is a very important point, and one that is not always appreciated. Think of this layer as the structure that makes possible emergent value for an organization by

It would have been nice if the authors could have provided more information on certain advanced topics. Treatment of web services, business processes and orchestration is very thin, and these are the emerging value centers for integration. Semantic integration, the future paradigm, receives only cursory treatment. Complex event processing and content integration (which poses separate problems from data integration) are not covered.

Still, a must read for anyone concerned with effective enterprise architecture.

Kool-Aid Worth Sippin'?
...I own Informatica tools and have personally experienced their value (properly implemented and utilized). However, I was concerned about vendor bias when I bought my copy of this work. Upon completion, it turns out there simply was no bias there. What is there? Pages of well-developed thoughts and practical concepts presented for consumption by novice or architect on what to most is still an evolving discipline. Master these competencies and unlock the benefits of agility inside your enterprise.

I just bought four more copies and consider it a must read for my managers. I `want' them to drink this kool-aid...