One of the fastest growing areas of application middleware will be integration platforms, according to Ovum, and they are increasingly being deployed in more complex enterprise projects. As this is still a new area, the issues and activities of integration projects are still being learnt by software architects and managers. In a previous post we covered why application integration is important, in this blog we providing a checklist for integration projects, based on the projects we have been involved in over the past four years.
Application and architecture
- What applications need to be integrated? How are you going to prioritize them?
- What is your integration strategy? What integration architecture will you need support for – cloud, mobile?
- What multi-point integrations will you need to plan for? What interactions between applications do you need to be aware of?
- Have you validated the integration capabilities of your applications? Can the applications meet the integration requirements the business needs?
Project management
- How will you manage integration projects? In-house, third party consultants, the integration partner?
- What metrics will you use to measure progress? Do you know what ‘done’ will look like?
- What training will the project team require? Will it mainly technical, or involve change management as well?
- Will you need to develop or manage APIs? With APIs playing a key role in making integrations easier, how will you speed API development?
Data management
- What is your plan to migrate legacy data?
- What security controls will you use?
- How do your applications expose data?
- How will you ensure data transformations and semantic matching are correct?
- What is your testing plan for the data required?
- Will the connections you use accommodate expected data volumes?
- How will you manage orchestrations of data flows – right sequence, right place, right time?
We would like to build this as a list that anyone can use for integration projects. If you have other items to add to the list, please send us a comment.
