A “Business service oriented” Approach to systems integration
Venk Gopal
Solutions Director
Logica
32 Hartwell Avenue
Lexington, MA 02421
Tel: 617-476-8239
Fax: 617-476-8017
Email: gopalv@logica.com
Abstract
Utility companies are being challenged to justify new IT investments due to the changing
economic outlook. However, IT managers and business leawders are continually being
pressured to improve operating efficiencies and support new regulatory and business functions.
The IT units go through several iterations of integration to deal with such challenges. This
presentation discusses how existing IT systems can be organized into a portfolio of “business
services” to support new functions and define measurable service levels, which helps simplify
the management of the overall integration effort.
The need for service levels on systems integration
After several decades of little change, utilites, as a result of restructuring, are becoming more
interesting and gaining visibiltiy among leaders in technology and business. The market
restructuing is attempting to move the utiltiy domain from a traditional, regulated, noncompetetive
physical infrastructure to a set of compliant/competetive, economically reformed
entities with high levels of service and fiscal accountability. In general terms – this translates into
a series of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures that introduce additional needs for business
units to integrate diverse organizations, while other organizations such as city owned utilities that
continue to remain vertically
integrated encounter similar
problems in a different way.
In either case, new business units
are developed and they have new
relationships to the parent
company as well as to external
parties. For example – when a
process becomes outdated, so does
the supporting systems. When
changes and improvements are made, business unit managers and executive management want
the ability to measure the effectiveness and results of the integration strategies that are put in
place. They want to be able to analyze results on an individual business services basis as well as
on the basis of the total enterprise and assign service levels to the Systems Integration
deliverables.
In recent years a concept known as “Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)” was introduced
as the solution to this problem. Its introduction resulted in a flood of EAI vendors into the utility
industry, successfully selling their integration tools to IT departments where they dealt with
interfacing complexity via a wrapping middleware layer. But these tools do not allow a utility to
assign service levels, effectively measure its operation environment and identify the reliability
and performance bottlenecks. This problem is applicable for all integration paradigms -
Application-To-Application (A2A), Business-To-Business (B2B) and Business-To-
Consumer(B2C). As a result, many EAI initiatives became an isolated or a stillborn IT project
with minimal budget leading to a mutant integration that failed to provide a measurable IT
solution.
