Integration Competency Centres and BizTalk

I really like the thought of an Integration Competency Centre inside an organisation. The notion of an Integration Competency Centre (ICC) has been around for quite a while… they are not a revelation as such... but over the last 18–24 months ICC’s have really struck accord with me personally. It’s no real surprise that my thoughts for them coincide with the success that BizTalk has had here in the last couple of years. Even so, these ICC’s are certainly technology agnostic. You could create one if you had bought BizTalk, Webmethods, Tibco or any integration software.

If I had my own company, and I had invested in integration software, I would *demand* to get incremental leverage and gains from each integration project. Providing a roadmap to achieve these gains is where an ICC can play a roll. In addition, an ICC gets all relevant and necessary stakeholders inside a business tuned in. Gartner has spoken about ICC’s for ages - at their ADWIS (Application Development, Web Services and Integration) Conferences and also still publish reasonably new research papers about them. You can even read a press piece on Best Buy’s ICC in the November 04 issue of CIO Magazine. The stats that are reported are quite remarkable.. e.g. “The payoff, CIOs say, comes from lowering the number of staff hours devoted to integration programming by weeks—even months—and increasing the reuse of application interfaces and processes by 30 percent to 50 percent, thereby reducing integration costs by millions of dollars.”

Early last year, our VP for Business Process and Integration was in Sydney and he gave a BTS roadmap presentation to audience of about 45 BizTalk Customers over lunch. At that same presentation, two gents from HP locally gave an overview of their ability to help customers develop an ICC. When we launched BrizTalk  (the Brisbane BTS User Group) we asked one of those gents, Jason Grant, to give a presentation to the user group on ICC. It was well received. This week in Melbourne, I caught up again with Gavin Wilson from HP (one of Jason’s colleagues) who explained to me some of the great work they are doing in Australia with ICC’s and the take up of customers implementing them. I was pleasantly surprised.

So what’s my point? I like the concept, deliverables and outcomes that result from and ICC. I’d be chuffed to know if any of you out there have actually got one in your company and what your thoughts have been with respect to the evolution of it.