Integration Competency Centers

Managing Data Integration Across the Enterprise. In Real Time.

What is an Integration Competency Center?
An Integration Competency Center is an infrastructure of people, technology, policies, best practices, and processes-all focused on rapid and cost-effective deployment of data integration projects critical to meeting organizational objectives. Organizations have found that there is a direct connection between the caliber of their ICC and the company’s ability to respond quickly to dynamically changing business models, intense competition, and demanding customers. In short, the ICC is the infrastructure responsible not only to deliver trustworthy data but to deliver it in real time.

• Optimize scarce resources by combining data integration and data quality skills, resources, and processes into one group
• Reduce project delivery times, and development and maintenance costs
• Improve ROI through reuse of source definitions, application interfaces, and codified business rules
• Decrease duplication of data integration and data quality efforts
• 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
• Build a platform that makes the right data available enterprise-wide

What is a Real-Time Integration Competency Center?
Business demand for data integration has gone beyond the batch-driven data warehouse or data mart where “analytical” data is the focus. More and more companies require trusted, real-time data to support operational initiatives such as master data management (MDM), data synchronization, and data replication, as well as real-time enterprise data warehousing. The most strategic IT organizations have responded with a real-time Integration Competency Center.

Informatica Release 8.5 — Technology foundation for the real-time ICC

With Release 8.5 as the foundation of the ICC, organizations can optimize 100% of data integration projects, so they can focus precious resources on initiatives that drive business growth and profitability. Release 8.5 delivers the following:

• The technology foundation required for the real-time ICC, empowering you to access and deliver real-time, trusted data throughout your enterprise.
• The collaboration tools necessary in any ICC to align cross-functional teams through a single platform, increasing responsiveness to the changing needs of the business.

A secure, collaborative, and scalable platform to guarantee smooth 24x7 access to mission-critical information as the ICC charter expands to support more projects across the enterprise.

 Learn more about Informatica Release 8.5

Best Practices
The Best Practices model defines processes for data integration initiatives and recommends appropriate technology, but does not share the development workload with individual project teams. The result is a higher overall ROI for each data integration initiative.

Technology Standards
The Technology Standards model standardizes development processes on a single, unified technology platform, enabling greater reuse of work from project to project. Although neither technology nor people are shared, standardization creates synergies among disparate project teams.

Shared Services
The Shared Services model defines processes, standardizes architecture, and maintains a centralized team for shared work, but most development work occurs in the distributed lines of business. This hybrid centralized/decentralized model optimizes resources.

Central Services
Centralized integration initiatives can be the most efficient and has the most impact on the organization. In this ICC model, standards and processes are defined, technology is shared, and a centralized team is responsible for all development work on integration initiatives.

Self-service ICC
The self-service ICC model both achieves a highly efficient operation and furnishes an environment where innovation can flourish. Self-service ICCs require strict enforcement of a set of application integration standards through automated processes and has a number of tools and systems in place that support automated or semi-automated processes.

Which ICC Model is Right for Your Business?

Each company needs to assess its own culture, cost sharing issues, existing processes, and headcount allocation to determine the ICC model that's right for it. Often development efforts and project workloads are too large for one centralized project team to handle. But by moving toward standardization and centralization of data integration initiatives, companies can eliminate redundant efforts, reuse work across multiple projects, optimize skill sets, and reduce costs.

Additional Resources

• White Paper: How to Design and Implement an Integration Competency Center (ICC) The What, Who, and How