Integration review is a powerful and useful tool, which can be used by an organisation to investigate its current level of integration from a number of perspectives; architecture, procedures, organisation, testing, documentation, and governance.

The point of performing an integration review is to give your organisation a correct assessment of your current situation and to highlight areas with potential for improvement, thus facilitating faster, cheaper, and more predictable delivery of stable solutions, and in the end also a maintenance situation with decreased costs and fewer incidents.

Lack of Control Results in Unnecessary Costs

Many enterprises have, as one part of their IT-strategies, defined an integration strategy and invested in an integration platform with the intention to create prerequisites for a cost effective, reliable, and loosely coupled integration architecture between ERP-systems, databases, applications, and partners. To achieve this, an organisational structure and procedures for integration regarding development and documentation etc. often are established as well. Unfortunately it, for several reasons, happens that the efforts do not have the wanted and expected results.

Examples on this can be that the costs are perceived as too high, the design and development of new solutions take too long, the platform used is perceived as unstable, or the cost for integration projects is unpredictable. It might also be the case that the initial steps have been taken successfully and you now want to take the next steps in order continue the improvement.

It is in situations like these an integration review can be beneficial. We at Ferrologic believe that the best results are achieved when the evaluation is performed by someone who has experiences with integration architecture and organisation for a large amount of companies. We also believe that the review potentially will be more objective if the individual managing it is external to the organisation being evaluated

Procedures for Integration Review

When review integration solutions, we at Ferrologic usually start with an AS-IS analysis that results in a number of improvement suggestions, followed by the formulation of an improvement plan. The review is performed through a combination of interviews with relevant roles in the ICC and a review of relevant documentation.

It is in the end of course up to you to tailor the review according to your specific needs and prerequisites but typically the review focuses on answering questions in the following areas:

• Cost, Time and Quality
Which are the key figures for costs for integration development and operation from different perspectives?
What are the statistics for availability and incidents?

• Architecture
What are the mechanisms for govern the architecture and how are they used?
How is reuse and quality facilitated?
How is the process supporting architectural efforts?

• Procedures and Organisation
Are there common work procedures?
Are defined processes being followed?
Are there process steps that work more/less well?
How is knowledge sharing between, architects, developers, and operational managers ensured?

• Testing
Is there a homogenous way to test solutions?
Do automated tests exist?
By who are the tests performed?
Are tools being used to perform and administer tests?

• Documentation
How are solutions tested?
How are maintenance and versioning of documentation performed?

• Governance
In what manner are code, components, and solutions maintained and versioned?
How are dependencies between integrations, systems, services, and applications managed?

Let Us Help You Find Your Improvement Potential

With our solid hands-on experiences from years of integration and migration projects in several lines of business, we at Ferrologic can help you to ensure a successful outcome of your integration efforts, in a structured and organised manner. We have successfully helped many organisation perform integration reviews and highlight areas that work well together with those having the potential for working even better.