Using an Enterprise Integration Competency Center to Drive Success with Enterprise SOA and Web Services
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Typical EAI Competency Center Goals and Achievements
· Creating an organizational focus on adopting distributed computing and sharing success with relevant application teams.
· Creating common guidelines and processes to help application development teams control requirements changes and manage the expectations of their project sponsors.
· Promoting business/IT alignment by enhancing collaboration between IT and business units, which leads to better IT performance and higher sponsor satisfaction.
· Building reference applications, frameworks and components that provide immediate ROI while being designed for aggressive reuse.
· Measuring the return on investment of major software components and applications.
· Developing client professionals knowledge of the issues, tools and techniques involved in EAI solutions. Therefore, they are more aware of previously developed integration points than are members of specific application groups, and this facilitates reuse.
· Actively leveraging talented and skilled client professionals across all application areas.
· The EAICC's explicit purpose is developing high-quality, reusable integration interfaces, and success (as measured by quality, efficiency and reuse) is far more likely than when integration is left to teams whose primary goal is developing single applications.
Critical Success Factors
· Successful EAI Competency Center launches need management buy-in to the EAICC charter. Depending on budgeting models, applications may be spending more money to do things the right way with regard to integration and management support is crucial in resolving the issues that arise from this conflict.
· The EAI Team should prepare and maintain a "City Plan" showing systems and integration points. This is actually one of the more complex artifacts we have developed at major clients, and it is invaluable for putting integration points into perspective and associating them with the business processes that they enable or improve.
· A lightweight, flexible development process is critical for success. The EAI portion of application-focused projects tends to be small in terms of effort, once the EAI team has developed and deployed fundamental frameworks and tools.
· A high-value artifact of EAI teams is an explicit process that helps control requirements changes on application projects. It manages the expectations of the application development teams while not imposing much overhead.
· Standards in the Web services arena are constantly changing. A well-layered architecture on both client and server is essential in providing a point of leverage for changing implementations of common architectural mechanisms, such as those for reliability, security and transactionality.
· Defined measurements for success, both quantitative and qualitative. These are driven by the business champion and IT.
· Testing is critical. This includes both volume testing to ensure that capacity thresholds are understood and regression testing to ensure that changes to services will be backward compatible.
· A strategy for versioning Web service interfaces is critical. Existing application integrations must continue to function through future rollouts of upgraded service functionality.
Conclusion As the EAICC initiative progresses, the EAICC team develops a formal charter that is recognized within the enterprise IT organization and by business units' applications groups. They establish productive working relationships with the applications groups. Enterprise integration does not live up to expectations if this collaborative relationship is not built. Together, the EAI team and the applications groups establish key processes for creating, managing and maintaining reusable software as services. They begin to develop useful models for measuring the value of reuse. Above all, perhaps, they build a robust, flexible infrastructure for creating, managing and maintaining service-oriented software.
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