Types of Application Integration

What Is Application Integration?

Your organization probably uses many applications and services that were built over many months or years, as new business needs were identified. As a result, these applications probably are of different ages, were written by different people using different languages and technologies, reside on different hardware platforms, use different operating systems, and provide very different functionality. In fact, many of your applications often have very little in common at all, resulting in isolated functionality and multiple instances of the same data. For your organization, these conditions can result in redundant activities, higher costs, and inefficient response to your customers.

If you have read this far, your organization has probably identified a business requirement for applications to work together. Just as employees have to work together to meet business goals, your applications need to do the same.

This guide defines application integration as follows:

Application integration is the secure and orchestrated sharing of processes and/or data between applications within the enterprise.

NOTE:  Although this definition restricts integration to sharing within the boundaries of an enterprise, the guidelines described in this document also help in providing integration between different enterprises.

Benefits of Application Integration

Effective application integration can provide your organization with the following important business benefits:

• Allowing applications to be introduced into the organization more efficiently and at a lower cost
• Allowing you to modify business processes as required by the organization
• Providing more delivery channels for your organization
• Allowing you to add automated steps into business processes that previously required manual intervention

Types of Application Integration

Application integration can be broadly categorized into three types:

• Manual application integration
• Semi-automated application integration
• Fully automated application integration

Most environments involve a combination of all three types. The following paragraphs describe each type in more detail.

Manual Application Integration

Manual application integration requires people (employees and customers) to act as the interfaces between applications and enable the integration between them. This form of application integration is very common. As an example, think of a customer service department that takes information from the public. People may enter the same information into multiple systems and read information from those systems to respond to customer requests. In other cases, a person may need to read customer information from one database, and then reenter it into another database used for another purpose.

This form of integration requires very little technology investment. It becomes more complex, however, when your organization becomes more complex, and can lead to inaccuracies in data. As the amount and complexity of your data increases, or as the number of applications increases, you will require more and more people to maintain such an environment. An environment that relies heavily on manual integration is generally very inefficient, and does not grow as easily as environments that use more automated techniques.

Semi-Automated Application Integration

Semi-automated application integration combines human steps with some automation. The person may be involved in an area where the corresponding automated solution is too difficult or expensive to implement, or where the business requires a person to make decisions. For example, your business may require a manager to approve all expense claims. In this case, all of the steps before and after managerial approval may be automated, but a person is required in the middle of the process. In other cases, human intervention may be needed to transform data that is required in another system.

Semi-automated application integration generally requires more technology investment, but once that investment is made, you can often reduce the number of people involved in integrating your applications. Reducing human involvement in this manner usually reduces costs and increases reliability.

Fully Automated Application Integration

Fully automated application integration removes people from the business process entirely, although they are required to maintain the solution. This type of integration consists of applications communicating through a series of interfaces and adapters. For example, two databases might share data, which is automatically transformed and committed to the second database from the first with no human interaction.

Although fully automated application integration removes the dependency on people, such systems can be more expensive to implement and may not be practical for many business problems. In many cases, you will still require people to make business decisions, and often it is more efficient to have a person control a technical process as well. For these reasons, you should decide where fully automated application integration is appropriate on a case-by-case basis.