Recognizing and Understanding the need for Application Integration in your business is only the first step in EAI. The more testing problems start after that. You know that the staff has a long list of problems they face with the current systems, your first challenge is to be able to compile all of them so that you have a sense of what really is going wrong. Then comes the question of where to start ? Do you want to create a specification that will be sent to the potential; vendors, or do you select a vendor first and ask them to collect requirements and shortcomings of existing systems and build specifications.
In most cases the latter option is more viable as the vendor will have the specialized knowledge and experience to be able to understand problems at the grass root level. And in most cases, even if you have a specification ready, they will need to build them again, so why waste your precious resource time.
There are some important things that one must keep in mind while planning for a new integrated application systems. These are the pointers that help you keep track of the deliverables that the vendor must offer:
Flexibility : Business needs are never constant. The requirements of your customers and users will keep on changing and so will your expectations from the system. Hence the new system should be flexible enough to meet the shifting needs
ScalabilityLike business needs, technologies are also changing rapidly. You want a new system that is easily scalable to embrace newer technologies. It should be easily upgrade-able.
Security An integrated application links opens up the doors of the application to many more users than before. Thus it is important that the security issues have been tackled properly.
User Interface Application integration also means that different users will have completely different expectations form the same application. Instead of getting lost in pages of irrelevant information, they would want to see records that are useful to them. Hence the application should have unique customized views.
To know more about our Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) services, please contact us. We offer solutions for Business software systems integration for B2B / B2C Applications
Further Reading
Restaurant Management application using software system integration model - Case Study
Web Services Based Application Integration - Case Study
EAI Considerations
XML Web services Development
Web services and SOA vision
SOA advantages
