An integration competency center (ICC), sometimes referred to as an integration center of excellence (COE), is a shared service function providing methodical data integration, system integration, or enterprise application integration within organizations, particularly large corporations and public sector institutions. Data integration allows companies to access their enterprise data and functions, fragmented across disparate systems, in order to create a combined, accurate, and consistent view of their core information as well as process assets and leverage them across the enterprise to drive business decisions and operations. System integration is the bringing together of component subsystems into a unified whole and ensuring that they function together effectively. Enterprise application integration enables efficient information exchanges and business process automation across separate computer applications in a cohesive fashion.
Overview Breaking down the acronym may enhance understanding. Integration refers to the objective of the ICC to take a holistic perspective and optimize certain qualities such as cost efficiency, organizational agility and effectiveness, operational risk, customer (internal or external) experience, etc. across multiple functional groups. Competency refers to the expertise, knowledge or capability that the ICC offers as services. Center means that the service is managed or coordinated from a common (central) point independent from the functional areas that it supports. Large organizations are usually sub-divided into functional areas such as marketing, sales, distribution, finance or human resources, to name just a few. These functional groups have separate operations, are vertically integrated and are sometimes referred to as "silos" or "stovepipes". From an organizational perspective, an ICC is a group of people with special skills who are centrally coordinated, and offer services to accomplish a mission that requires separate functional areas to work together. Key objectives of an ICC include:
Lead and support enterprise integration (data, system and process) projects with the cooperation/coordination of subject matter experts. Promote enterprise integration as a formal discipline. For example, data integration will include data warehousing, data migration, data quality management, data integration for service-oriented architecture deployments, and data synchronization. Similar systems integration will include common messaging services, business service virtualization, etc. Develop staff specialists in integration processes and operations and leverage their expertise company-wide. Assess and select integration technology and tools from the marketplace. Manage integration pilots and projects across the organization. Optimize integration investments across the entire enterprise. Leverage economies of scale for the integration tools portfolio at the enterprise level. ICCs allow companies to:
Optimize scarce resources by combining integration skills, resources, and processes into one group. Reduce project delivery times, development and maintenance costs through effectiveness and efficiency. Improve ROI through creation and reuse of enterprise assets like source definitions, application interfaces, and codified business rules. Decrease duplication of integration related efforts across the enterprise. Build on past successes instead of reinventing the wheel with each project. Lower total technology cost of ownership by leveraging technology investments across multiple projects. An ICC may be a temporary group in support of a program or a permanent part of the organization. Furthermore, ICCs can be established at various scales or levels, within divisions of a company, at the enterprise level, or across multiple companies in a supply chain.
History The term "integration competency center" and its acronym ICC was popularized by Roy Schulte of Gartner in a series of articles and conference presentations beginning in 2001 with The Integration Competency Center. He picked up the term from one of his colleagues, Gary Long, who found some of his clients using it (they took the established term “competency center” and applied it to integration). Prior to that (from 1997 to 2001) Gartner had been referring to it as the central integration team. The concept itself (even before it was given a label) goes back to 1996 in one of Gartner's first reports on integration. A major milestone was the publication in 2005 of the first book on the topic: Integration Competency Center: An Implementation Methodology by John G. Schmidt and David Lyle. The book introduced five ICC organizational models and explored the people, process and technology dimensions of ICCs. Several reviews of the book can be found at IT Toolbox and at Amazon. The concept of integration as a competency in the IT domain has now survived for over 10 years and appears to be picking up momentum and broad-based acceptance. These days ICCs are often called integration centers of excellence, SOA centers of excellence, data management centers of excellence and other variants. The most advanced ICCs are using Lean Integration practices to optimize end-to-end processes and to drive continuous improvements. Universities are also beginning to include integration topics in their MBA programs and computer science curricula. For example, The College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University has established an Enterprise Informatics and Integration Center with the following mission: "The Enterprise Informatics and Integration Center (EI²) will actively engage industry, non-profit, and government agency leaders to address critical issues in enterprise processes, knowledge management, and decision making."
Operating models There are a number of ways an ICC can be organized and a wide range of responsibilities with which it can be chartered. The ICC book introduced five ICC organizational models and explored the people, process and technology dimensions of ICCs. They include:
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