Vision

Intro

Development is essential for the future of your organisation. Every organisation is a developing organisation. Reorganisations, Business Process Reenginering, the explorations of new markets are all drivers for change. ICT is often only a supporting part in these processes, but IT solution providers are not always willing to incorporate your change requests into their systems. This article is not a request to get rid of you're ICT solution providers, it is a request on you to think about local IT development as a solution to information sharing, but also to pay respect to its threats.

Motto

Local IT software development is a must and joy for every organisation!

Practice

IT has become more and more important on all aspects of your organization. Applications and tooling are widely used to perform specific tasks more efficiently. Every, well, almost all, employee is using his favourite software to work with. For you're fincancial reporting worker this might be a simple spread sheet or an advanced system. Your production staff is using other software to control or administer their production.  In a bad situation the production workers need to administrate their work in multiple systems. This may lead to inconsistencies, errors, missed billing, or wrong products.

The Need for EAI

In the optimal situation your organisation uses exactly one software (ERP) product with which every employee can work. If so, You can stop reading this article.

Situations are never optimal. Organisation must be in constant change, and they will need adjustments to software and processes, resulting in different information needs.

The best-of-breed approach to software calls for techniques that are able to integrate all those applications. EAI and SOA are such techniques, concentrating on the flow of information, messages or a combined construction of information items. In the medical world the CCOW standard concentrates on the visualization aspects of application integration.

The Need for Structure in your Software Development

This might be shock for you, but within your organistation people are already developing solutions to their every problems. This can be as simple as an export button in some Excell sheet, the dayly retrieval of a price-list-file out of you're ERP system, or it can be more advanced: a complete application in JAVA or .NET, that is fulfilling some business specific task. In any way your organisation is developing all over the place.

The risks of such developments are manyfold. First, the development should be well documented, allowing for backup by other developers. Second it should be well maintained, if something goes wrong people have to be informed of the problems, allowing for quick responses.  Third, the architecture of the applications should be such that re-use of components is easy, or otherwise people are inventing the wheel again and again.

Conclusion

Todays Business processes depent heavily on information that is stored withing different systems. IT Solution providers are not always willing to incorpate information from other systems into their systems. Local (EAI) software development is a common day to day practice in most organisations but this activity must be monitored.