Integration Competency Center - Overview

Overview

The term may be better understood by examining each of the three words that comprise the acronym. 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, human resources to name just a few. These functional groups have separate operations and are vertically integrated and are therefore 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 are:

• 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 system 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 enterprise level
• Leverage economies of scale for the integration tools portfolio at enterprise level

ICCs allow companies to:

• Optimize scarce resources by combining integration skills, resources, and processes into one group
• Reduce project delivery times and 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 effort 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, ICC’s can be established at various scales or levels; within a division of a company, at the enterprise level, or across multiple companies in a supply chain.