Finding a connection with IT.

• Author: Choksy, Carol E.B.
• Position: Integration and SOA: Concepts, Technologies, and Best Practices - Book review

TITLE: Integration and SOA: Concepts, Technologies, and Best Practices

EDITOR: Beth Gold-Bernstein and Gary So

PUBLISHER: ebizQ and webMethods

PUBLICATION DATE: 2006

LENGTH: 144 pages

PRICE: Complimentary copies available in printed, soft cover version or e-book

SOURCE: www.ebizQ.net/soaebook

Some enterprise content management (ECM) analysts state with alarm that there are no enterprise-wide implementations of ECM or enterprise resource management (ERM) applications. The reasons they give for this are many, including lack of a proper taxonomy and poor training. Another reason is the lack of integration between ECM applications and other applications, such as ERM products like SAP, or point solutions like invoice approvals.

The concept of integrating two applications is easy to understand. But integrating the multiple applications used in a single business process--as well as integrating them with such enterprise applications as ERM and upgrading those integrations when any single product changes--begins to look like a problem in quantum physics. This book takes a strategic viewpoint of integration and explains how integration, service oriented architecture (SOA), and web services can be seen as a way for organizations to become more agile in information technology. (See sidebar, "Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Web Services Defined.")

Chapter 1," The Business Imperative for Integration," explains why integration is of strategic importance to businesses. It describes how companies have solved problems using information technology over the past 40 years and how the changing landscape of technology solutions from mainframes to minis to client-server solutions has created information silos that solved departmental problems while making business process management nearly impossible.

Chapter 2, "Building the Business Case for Integration," describes the business case for integration including hard and soft, tangible and intangible benefits. These include eliminating hard-coded, point-to-point integrations that are difficult to change when applications are upgraded, reduced total cost of ownership for applications needing integration, and higher-quality business processes with fewer errors. The chapter describes the need for an enterprise approach to integration spanning multiple projects.

Chapter 3, "Common Integration Scenarios," describes various situations requiring integration and what tools are needed, including synchronizing data, automating...