3rd Edition - eBusiness Integration Bulletin - Special Pre-Show Issue - September 2000  

From our President: Gregg V. Rock, President, BrainStorm Group, Inc.

From the Chairman: The Essential Information Integration Strategy, by William Ulrich, eBusiness Integration Conference Chairman, and President, Tactical Strategy Group

The Experts Corner:  Intelligent Application Integration, by JP Morgenthal, Author of Enterprise Application Development with XML & Java, by Prentice Hall

Conference Preview: eBusiness Integration Conference San Francisco - October 2-4, 2000

 

From our President

Gregg V. Rock, President, BrainStorm Group, Inc.

Welcome to a special edition of BrainStorm Group's eBusiness Integration Bulletin! The articles and conference preview featured in this issue will provide you with a sampling of the issues addressed at our upcoming San Francisco eBusiness Integration Conference, which will be held October 2-4.

Don't miss this opportunity to meet face to face with eBusiness Integration "thought leaders", highly acclaimed authors, writers and editors, representatives from leading analyst and research firms, and END USER practitioners.

I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

 

From the Chairman: 

The Essential Information Integration Strategy 

By William Ulrich, eBusiness Integration Conference Chairman and President, Tactical Strategy Group

What is really behind the success of an e-business initiative? Is there a secret to succeeding in a business-to-business endeavor across a wide range of organizations? When will supply chains achieve the level of synchronization needed to make an exponential economic difference? How can your company make its mark in a virtual world? The driving force behind the hype surrounding many of these issues is information integration.

Integrating information, across the enterprise and within your industry sector, should be at the top of your corporate agenda. Piecemeal, poorly coordinated information integration efforts can send a company one step forward and two steps back. But what are we really trying to integrate and how can these efforts be coordinated across business units, data architectures, applications, web sites, suppliers, customers and industry consortiums? The answer to this question can be found within your information integration strategy – assuming you have one. An information strategy binds individual integration projects that, left uncoordinated, could introduce even more problems into your information infrastructure.

Your information integration strategy should, by definition, be as comprehensive as possible. Companies need to integrate information at the micro and macro level to ensure the consistency and integrity of that information as it pertains to your ability to function as an enterprise. A second requirement is recognizing the reality of the dependencies inherent in an integration effort. While vendors and analysts tout the wonders of business-to-business integration, the reality is that most companies cannot even get their e-business site to communicate with their procurement systems.

In other words, integration needs to happen at multiple levels, across multiple organizational units and all of this needs to be carefully coordinated. The challenge of defining your integration requirements and then launching multiple initiatives to meet these requirements is daunting. Consider the functions and entities involved.

At a business unit level, information provided to and by your systems must be consistent with information in other business units. Data architectures should eliminate or synchronize the redundancies typically found in legacy architectures. Disparate business units within an enterprise should provide customers with the same answer to the same question. Physical and electronic supply chains should share consistent, rationalized views of the same data across the spectrum of companies defined to that supply chain. This may sound like the Holy Grail of information integration, but nothing less is acceptable as the ultimate goal for corporations and industries as they leave the industrial era behind and move into a world that is driven by information.

You may be wondering if now is the right time to launch a comprehensive integration initiative. What if you cannot get the backing of senior management to coordinate and sustain a cross-functional integration effort? A business must feel the pain before a given problem gets management’s attention, sponsorship and funding. Given that management can recognize and quantify the symptoms, the integration challenge is now reaching the threshold of pain necessary for senior management to listen and support a plan of action.

If you are not quite sure of this, consider the jump in demand for web-based, customer facing systems needing to transfer customer-related information in a real time mode. Further consider that much of this information is still locked away inside of legacy systems where a customer may be defined as ten different things in ten different ways to a host of stovepipe systems. Now imagine that your web-based, order entry system must interface with these back-end legacy systems and be fully functional by year-end. Getting your arms around this challenge requires a cross-functional effort.

In some cases, however, a business unit may decide to rig a solution in the absence of cross-functional support. Take, for example, a project launched by a service supplier that places a web-based front-end on three legacy systems. This web-based system resulted from demands made by customers who wanted an integrated solution across business units at that service supplier. The integration tasks defined under this project included creating a common front-end, linking the new site to each of three back-systems and bypassing the three application specific security screens so the customer would think that this is now a single application.

The project team felt that they had achieved integration – but a second look tells us otherwise. Consider what was not done on this project and it speaks volumes about this organization’s particular integration strategy. The data structures used by these stand-alone systems remain separate and inconsistently defined. Enhancement requests from a customer who believes these systems to be integrated will eventually grow unmanageable. The security access scheme was rigged and could result in a customer gaining unauthorized access to internal systems. The applications themselves will begin receiving common enhancement requests that they may not be able to fulfill and the website is only integrated at the most superficial level.

Complicating this scenario is the fact that the enterprise will continue to sponsor other projects like this one and then attempt to layer additional levels of integrated facades on top of the collective results. The situation companies are creating is one where executives perceive that systems are becoming increasing integrated when just the opposite is true. And these internal integration projects are the foundation for marketplace integration initiatives now underway among suppliers, distributors and industry partners.

One way to ensure that progress is being made towards an integrated enterprise and business-to-business model is to establish an integration "hub" structure. A hub structure is an organizational development term for a functional working group with a defined purpose, clear agenda, appropriate authority and representation from all relevant and affected parties. This integration hub could set strategy, recommend or sponsor various integration projects, and assess cross-functional and external dependencies for any proposed integration initiative.

The role of the integration hub would also include reviewing customer, supplier, web-site, data architecture, application infrastructure, front-end, middleware, security and new technology integration from a holistic perspective. If an integration initiative was too narrowly defined or beyond the scope of a given business unit, the integration hub could launch an umbrella project to address integration issues at a more strategic level.

How we respond to integration demands will determine how effectively companies can compete in coming decades. As you contemplate this, consider that building, launching and sustaining an integration strategy must be woven into the fabric of the enterprise. This is not a one-time project where the IT people can pull one more miracle out of their collective hats. Integration of information, within and beyond the enterprise, must by its very nature involve multiple business units, executives, IT people, web developers and a growing host of external entities.

Without a comprehensive integration strategy that can bind disparate entities within and outside of the enterprise, companies and industries are like to struggle with individual initiatives that could ultimately be working at cross-purposes. Taking ownership of this effort will demonstrate leadership, but will again be a major challenge. Project leaders from all corners of a given enterprise should band together to demand the requisite levels of leadership, sponsorship, funding, commitment and participation from management and from any external entities with a stake in an integrated information enterprise.

Integration is not a buzzword and it is not one more item on an IT task list that can be worked in when time permits. Integration requires a shift in thinking and a change in how various functions within and outside of an organization interact. With so much at stake, all relevant and affected parties should step to the table now to build an integration strategy that can become the backbone for key initiatives going forward.

 

The Experts Corner: 

Intelligent Application Integration 

By JP Morgenthal, Conference Executive Advisory Board Member, Author of Enterprise Application Development with XML & Java, by Prentice Hall

The role of the Information Technology department within companies is changing. It is making the transition from managing application and electronic transactions to organizing the company’s information and potential knowledge. Part of this role entails helping the company to remove systems from departmental isolation and integrate them into the enterprise as a whole.

There are a number of techniques, tools, technologies and products that enable companies to perform application integration. But underlying all application integration projects is a business need to aggregate or share information between two or more systems. Unfortunately, due to time and resource constraints these application integration projects often are viewed at a surface level as technical entities rather than as an opportunity to clearly organize and document a business-critical process. That is, the value of the integration is lost in favor of getting the work done.

Fortunately, though, there are some excellent tools that recognize and support IT’s need to get the integration project finished and that also underscore the opportunity to capture business processing metadata and centralize it for reuse. Tools are now readily available that combine application integration plumbing with business rules visualization to get the job done and at the same time build a repository of business processing rules.
Event-Condition-Action (bold in black)

Event-Condition-Action (ECA) is the foundation of intelligent application integration. With ECA systems, a number of possible scenarios could be initiated for each event generated. Each scenario is identified as a conditional statement that, if satisfied, performs some action.

Products in this space are differentiated by how they implement ECA to the user, what types of actions they can perform, and how quickly they can respond to events on the server.

ECA is a powerful paradigm for application integration because it very closely models the real-world business processing. For example, an event might constitute notification that a particular backordered item is now in stock. The condition for this event might be checking if there are customers on the waiting list for this item. And, the action for this event might be notifying the first 'n' customers on the list that the product is now in stock, where 'n' is the number of items in stock.

In terms of systems needed that support this process, in this scenario, the inventory generates the event, thus removing the need to issue a query to the inventory system. This results in overall throughput of the system. The action logic only needs to check the sales database for customers waiting for this particular backordered item, and then generate a mailing, or some similar notification path, to those customers (figure 1). Without ECA systems, this would have become a specifically coded piece of software that is run in either a batch or interactive manner, that pulls information from inventory and sales, then generates the mailing (figure 2).

Over time, company policies change. Perhaps in a year, it would be necessary to update the constraint, for instance, to check that a customer has been waiting for at least three weeks before notifying them, thus forcing the customer to contact the store, thereby saving on the cost of notification. In the batch-oriented scenario, a developer would have to modify the source code for the batch process to handle the new constraint. But the new ECA systems merely must update the condition for the event record and continue running as normal.

It is important to note that this particular scenario lends itself to a batch alternative. Many processes require near-real-time notification that an event has occurred which makes hand-crafted solutions more complex and costly to develop and maintain over time.

Business Rules Repositories

Creating and managing a set of ECA processes is an important part of the intelligent integration scenario. But, equally important is the creation of a repository of rules that can be managed and updated from any network station.

A repository provides a centralization of the company's lifeblood—its business rules. For many companies these rules are trapped inside of program source code or database-stored procedures and they are spread throughout hundreds of disparate systems. Hence, there is no cohesive source that identifies how the company electronically processes any one singular event. By moving toward an ECA infrastructure, companies will be better enabled to visualize how they perform certain tasks and optimize accordingly. Also, optimization can occur inside of the repository, saving hundreds of hours of re-development.

In addition, these repositories lend themselves to reuse of rules that are already defined, thereby saving time in development. For example, the same condition or action might apply to multiple processes. Therefore, a system that allows events, conditions, and actions to be defined separately, and then linked together over a particular process, best lends itself to reuse.

 

Conference Preview:
eBusiness Integration Conference: B2B Integration Strategies and Solutions
San Francisco, October 2-4, 2000 

Our San Francisco conference has received unprecedented support from Business and IT Professionals alike. We will be hosting hundreds of eBusiness professionals in San Francisco, including representatives from 12+ countries. Plus, over 40 organizations which have joined together as co-sponsors to support the launch of the industry's first and leading forum dedicated to eBusiness Integration Strategies & Solutions. 

Don't miss this opportunity to hear how General Motors, Fluor Corporation, The Boeing Corporation, Ethyl Corporation and Southwestern Bell and others are addressing their eBusiness Integration challenges.

Extended educational sessions will detail the latest technological advancements, proven "Best of Breed" solutions, lessons learned and developing trends in e-business integration.

Keynote Presenters include: Ron Shelby, former CIO, eGM - eCommerce Division of General Motors; Mike Gilpin, Vice President and Research Leader, Giga Information Group; William Ulrich, Conference Chairman and President, Tactical Strategy Group; Beth Gold-Bernstein, Track Chair and Vice President, Strategic Products and Services, ebizQ.net --- a complete agenda is available for your review.

REGISTER NOW!
Register before September 22nd to receive 
Advanced Registration Discount ($100 savings over on-site)

SPECIAL NOTE: Post-Conference Seminars
The following Seminars will be held on Wednesday Oct. 4th from 1:00 - 4:30 - special discounts are available to BrainStorm San Francisco attendees.

 

Additional BrainStorm Events in 2000 Include: 

eBusiness Integration Conference
November 13-15, New York City

eBusiness Strategy Conference: Turning Vision Into Value
October 2-4, San Francisco
November 13-15, New York City


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