Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

I received a very nice email from Michael Kuhbock, the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Integration Consortium. He provided me with another definition of integration that he said allowed end-users at corpoorations to provide a better understanding, from a business-point-of-view,  to their business counterparts:

“Being a business man rather than a technical professional or engineer,” Kuhbock said,  ”I have found that one of the main reasons the industry  has alignment problems is due to innefective communication.”

Here’s the definition of integration from the Integration Consortium, courtesy of Michael Kuhbock:

Integration (in-te-gra-tion) - a combination of parts or objects that work well together.
Communication (com-mu-ni-ca-tion) - the exchange of information. Integration is the successful communication between data, applications, processes, people and enterprises.       

I really like this definition because it’s functional as opposed to technical.  Yes, technology has to be involved to make parts of  this happen, but at the end of the day integration is more about a way of operating a company or an organization rather than a cool technology that everybody has to have. A company can have excellent integration between applications, but if the people are not communicating  with each other or using the data effectively, then there’s no business value there. 

 Thanks, Michael!