Chapter Eighteen. 12 Steps to Application Integration

So, now that we know most of the technical details about application integration, the question arises: How do we leverage this technology within our enterprise? The answer to this question is more about "methodology" than "silver bullet," and it's clear that there is much work to be done to make application integration work within your company. The purpose of this chapter is to tie everything together for you, providing you with a step-by-step procedure, which, if followed, will ensure success in your enterprise.

Our "12-step program" for integrating applications relies upon a practical approach to application integration. We reuse some of the activities we've learned with traditional database design, application design, and development. Many times, we use the same design patterns to bind applications together as we did to build them. After all, there is no need to reinvent the wheel if the result will only confuse an already-complex process.

This pragmatic approach relies on familiar concepts and terms such as metadata, schemas, object-oriented modeling, object-oriented analysis and design, patterns, and good old requirements-gathering techniques. Although these are not the only activities in an application integration project, the following steps should be considered when approaching application integration:

1. Understand the enterprise and problem domain.

2. Make sense of the data.

3. Make sense of the processes.

4. Identify any application interfaces.

5. Identify the business events.

6. Identify the data transformation scenarios.

7. Map information movement.

8. Apply technology.

9. Test, test, test.

10. Consider performance.

11. Define the value.

12. Create maintenance procedures.

In this chapter, we concentrate on steps 2 and 3 because we begin to define the models that will serve as the basis for our application integration solution at those steps. These steps are also unique to our approach.