Tired of throwing money at multiple point solutions that perform identical data integration tasks? Integration Competency Centers can help.

Nobody plans for inefficiency. Changes can go unnoticed as business needs shift and teams react by slowly adding applications. It is easy to overlook the data accumulating around you.

This accumulation is a by-product of an organization lacking centralized data management. Because individual integration projects are managed at different point interfaces, they have their own established data-integration processes. This redundancy results in wasted time, money, and resources. With no time and no money, it is hard to focus on activities that add value to the business.

This is where you come in. It’s your job to stop these inefficient practices.

Think holistically

Recognizing the need for change is the first step toward changing processes and introducing efficiency. Your next task is to get rid of redundancies by standardizing processes. You can accomplish this by managing data integration as a whole with an Integration Competency Center (ICC) or Center of Expertise (COE).

Think of an ICC as a highly functional centralized factory creating repeatable processes you can share among every data integration project across your entire organization. Any project owner, regardless of what their applications do, can reuse ICC building blocks and approach data integration in a more efficient manner.

Reap the ICC Rewards

Used on an ongoing basis, ICC principles can help you substantially reduce the IT waste that occurs when you allow individual projects to run their own discrete integration processes. Here are three ways they accomplish that:

• ICCs streamline infrastructure. Do you really need 26 unique integration servers doing the same thing? Probably not. An ICC eliminates siloes and provides a scalable, shared infrastructure, so you can cut the cost and maintenance required by excessive hardware and licenses.
• ICCs create common data quality routines. By standardizing on tools and processes, you can free up resources, share the tools themselves, as well as reuse the logic created by those tools.
• ICCs support continuous improvement. You won’t see all the benefits of an ICC on day one, but they will evolve as you continue to standardize. Intuitive tools can collect the metadata and let you to manage your data yourself with no coding. You will notice that development steadily accelerates, which in turn, drives IT agility. A small application change once required hours of calls between stakeholders, for example. Standardizing on a central metadata repository can reduce that time to mere minutes.

Cleaning up your IT waste using an ICC model can help you reclaim valuable operating funds for more strategic innovation. At the same time, it can help ensure that your applications and processes scale appropriately to improve performance in a large, data-driven organization.

For more on the cost-efficiencies afforded by ICCs, read the white paper Economics of Integration Competency Centers.