Connecting A to B: Integration a function of semantics?
A great little article by Sean McGrath from from ITworld.com appeared yesterday which should serve sales people as well as data integration project managers equally. Essentially, to summarize, if an executive says she wants to connect A to B, you need to dig deeper to see what that really means. Is it connecting A to B to “advance some process that B is involved in”? Or is it to connect A with information from B in order to enable a report from a reporting module in B.
In reality, McGrath says, A to B in the first scenario is just a simple application integration scenario, where B needs data from A in order to effect a business process. The second scenario is an ETL scenario, whereby you need to actually take data from A and B and put it into a third repository, C, in order to run a report on this.
I think McGrath does a great job of simplifying the message that a seemingly straightforward integration request is not as straightforward as it seems. You need to ask the right questions, dig deeper, and find out what the end-goal is.
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