Here’s the good news: Integrating your business applications can save you millions of dollars on your IT budget. Now here’s the bad news: Integrating your business applications can cost you millions of dollars and add significantly to your IT budget.

Practically every company today is struggling with integrating applications and data in order to increase efficiency, reduce overhead and deliver new services.

Unfortunately, there are many instances where the promised return on investment on these integration projects has failed to materialize.

Enter integration blueprinting. This tool can help you increase the profitability of your integration projects and help you avoid the pitfalls associated when attempting to mesh your disparate systems.

Integration uncovered

The objective of business integration is to improve organizational efficiency and deliver new services by connecting staff and systems at three levels: throughout the immediate organization, across the extended enterprise, and to external entities such as customers and business partners.

By interweaving data and business processes, users are provided with timely and accurate information, together with the ability to analyze and act upon that information.

More specifically, employees have better tools to carry out their duties, managers are able to identify and analyze opportunities and problems, and customer service is improved through the availability of accurate and up-to-date information.

There are myriad companies providing various technologies to enable business integration but IT solutions usually encompass one or more of the following aspects of integration:

-Integration of disparate internal systems. Traditionally called enterprise application integration (EAI), this is the plumbing necessary to make integration work. EAI typically includes various combinations of point-to-point, hub-and-spoke and distributed architectures. EAI vendors, among them IBM, BEA Systems, Tibco, WebMethods and SeeBeyond, offer a number of proprietary solutions.  

-Data integration. In order to make critical business decisions, businesses need timely, detailed and accurate data. With mergers, acquisitions and the organic growth of the company, much of this information can be locked in individual business areas with little or no sharing of information. Data integration enables data from distributed systems to be consolidated into a single, comprehensive view of the entire enterprise, providing executives and managers with valuable business intelligence.

-Business process management. BPM is the automation of tasks and activities companies conduct as they go about their business. These activities can be either internal or external to the organization. BPM manages the flow of these activities across different applications and business departments, in the process allowing processes to be monitored and analyzed.

-Business activity monitoring. BAM provides managers with dynamic insight into business activities, allowing managers to be notified about such strategic business policies as service level agreements. Typically, BAM extends across all of a company’s integrated applications.

-Portals. Portals provide users with a personalized interface into their business processes and systems. For example, they provide a means of routing tasks and exceptions to people as part of an organization’s BPM or business-to-business integration initiative.

*Business-to-business connectivity (B2B). B2B is aimed at improving the way companies interact with business partners and customers, enabling them to securely transfer information over external networks, including the Internet. This communications link improves efficiency and cost-effectiveness, particularly where business processes span multiple organizations.

-Web services. Web services are the new kid on the block. They are self-contained, standards-based software that can be accessed over the Internet and corporate intranets. Because they are standards-based, Web services components can be built using any hardware platform, security model or programming language. Web services act as the enabling technology for an enterprise service bus (ESB), a method that connects applications and services throughout an enterprise. It’s widely seen as the next generation of application integration.

-XML standards. XML is used in conjunction with Web services to facilitate communication and simplify interactions across components.

Where’s my ROI?

Business leaders are becoming (rightly) skeptical about the money-saving promises put forward by solution providers and IT departments. Frequently, delivered results do not fulfill the promises. There are a number of possible reasons for this:

-Not enough strategic planning. A 2004/05 survey of 87 Australian chief information officers and IT managers conducted by InterSystems Corp. found that fewer than 37 percent of organizations interviewed had a documented business integration strategy. How do you know if you’ve arrived if you don’t know where the road was leading?

-Too much strategic planning. You know when you’ve gone overboard on strategic planning when a 500-page report lands on your desk, telling you that it’s going to take five years before your system will be ready. Successful implementation of business integration depends upon defining a number of very specific business problems with clear and short ROIs.

-Technology-driven solutions. Integration solutions are often developed from the ground up, which means that they are focused on the technology rather than the business requirements. For example, developers may make assumptions about low-level IT events that could later impact business processes in an unexpected and unfortunate manner.

-Business users marginalized. Effective integration requires the careful coordination of personnel and information technology assets, both inside your business and in your network of customers and partners.

-Unforeseen complexity. The very nature of the integration beast means that spanning multiple systems using different programming languages, data formats, security models and transport protocols has, to date, been complex and labor intensive.

-Lack of staff with specific technical skill-sets. Each integration vendor (Tibco, WebMethods, SeeBeyond, IBM, BEA, etc.) provides proprietary products, requiring specialized developer skill-sets and forcing vendor lock-in. This means the additional expense of acquiring or training staff with the appropriate skill-set. The advent of Web-based standards could eliminate this obstacle.

These challenges, in turn, can be generalized into two categories: lack of planning (both strategic and tactical), and technology issues. It is the planning issues that concern us most. The effectiveness of the integration planning stage is the most important factor determining integration success.

We already have a plan, don’t we?

 You may very well have an integration plan. If you do, that’s great - you’re already ahead of 63 percent of the competition.

But having an integration plan is not enough.

As we have seen, it is the detailed planning of the integration project that determines how successful it is going to be. What you really need to ensure success is an integration blueprint.

Who would benefit most from an integration blueprint?

Obviously, any organization recognizing the need for integration but not yet embarked upon an integration project would be a prime candidate. But any company where its business leaders are concerned that the maximum ROI is not being achieved by an existing integration project would also benefit.

The key features of an integration blueprint are:

-It should be a relatively low-cost blueprint to act as a framework to proceed pragmatically.

-It should carry out a methodical profit-related analysis to ensure increased profitability and the best possible ROI.

-It should have different “layers” so that it is understandable to both the business and IT staff. This will empower business leaders to make decisions and remain stakeholders in the integration effort. It is essential that the blueprint is business driven rather than technology driven.

The blueprint should be treated as a living document that changes in line with business initiatives and technological advances. For example, the face of integration is changing, with the advent of Web services, enterprise service bus and business activity monitoring. The blueprint should take all relevant emerging technologies into account, and determine how and when to incorporate them to maximize commercial advantage.

Creating the blueprint

There are a number of options available to companies, including in-house IT staff, integration software vendors, system integrators (SIs) and consultants.

“It pays to think very carefully about who you will get to create your integration blueprint,” said Russell O’Brien, chief executive officer of London-based Bluescribe Pty Ltd. (www.bluescribe.com), a systems integrator that specializes in providing blueprinting services to newspapers.

One Bluescribe client, Associated Newspapers Ltd. in the United Kingdom, cut its IT budget by almost $9 million after it blueprinted integration efforts aimed at meshing  its publishing software.

O’Brien likens the process of creating an integration blueprint to building a house. “It is possible for a house to be designed by either an architect or a builder,” he said. But where there are sticky technical issues to be overcome, most people hire an architect, O’Brien said.

“Integration blueprinting is the same,” he said. “In some cases, it’s OK for SIs to do the planning, but for more sophisticated projects, it is preferable for the planning and the implementation to be carried out separately by independent bodies.”

That approach, he said, enables integrators and vendors to perform their specialized functions, such as building the system, while the blueprinting companies perform theirs: designing the integration blueprint.

“The other advantage of using an independent blueprinting company to create your plan is that the company will not be aligned to any product or technology,” he said. “They will have no vested interest in selling your company further integration products, licenses, professional services or resources to staff your project.”

Companies should also realize they will need a “well-defined and exhaustive integration blueprint development methodology,” O’Brien said.

“Integration can be an extremely complex business and when the plans are being drawn up, you really don’t want anything to be overlooked or misapplied.

“Before choosing a blueprint provider, ask them about how they will develop the blueprint, even to the extent of obtaining a documented description of the process that they intend to follow.”

Newspaper industry consultant Allan Marshall formerly served as chief operations and technology services director at Associated Newspapers Ltd. He can be reached at allan_marshall@hotmail.com.