Lets face it, integration is boring stuff to do. At least, that is the commonly held view by the poor techies that get lumbered doing it, and if integration is just seen as exchanging messages between systems then boring, although tricky, it is.

Process improvement, on the other hand, is much more rewarding and its process improvement, not integration, that is the aim. The difference between the two is that integration is an under the covers activity that, of itself, achieves little. Process improvement includes integration as a necessary requirement of a greater need, a need that involves business logic and new screens.

A simple illustration of the difference is as follows. Company A, a water company. There are several systems that need to use customer data and currently, each maintains its own customer database. In addition, there are several statutory reporting systems and target measures that also need data from each of the customer based systems. The same customers appear in several of the databases, but often the data stored does not match and much energy is used and cost incurred through attempts to reconcile the data and double entry.

There are two approaches to trying to improve this situation. The first is the integration approach. This involves connecting the various databases together and comparing the data stored in an attempt to achieve consistency. This normally means making one database the master and then aligning the other with it.

The second is the process improvement approach. In this case, a single new interface to the outside world is created which captures all information and distributes the data to the various systems underneath as required.

Until the advent of Datadialogs Eden software, this would be a major undertaking requiring many, many man months of effort. Eden is a combined EAI, advanced rules engine and Mashup composer and it is entirely codeless. It is designed to undertake just this type of work and such as task can be completed in a few days.

This is a quote from Andy Shorey - IT manager of Bournemouth and Hampshire Water. “With Eden, we accomplished in four days what we had not managed to do with IBM WebSphere in four months”

So there we are - Process Improvement, not integration and if you want to be a star, use and entirely codeless tool set like Eden from Datadialogs.