InformationWeek

July 24, 2000

Prioritize, Centralize, And Test During Integration

By Susan Breidenbach

onathan Vaughan, VP of technology strategy and architecture, and his colleagues at Prudential Insurance Co. of America give Level 8 Systems' Geneva Integration Broker high marks. But they also offer some implementation pointers to companies contemplating similar application-integration projects:

Prioritization. Devote considerable forethought and planning on deciding which messages you want to develop and which business objects to deliver, and in what order. Impose a management discipline that prioritizes goals and tasks and focuses first on the ones that will deliver the highest business benefits.

Centralization. Geneva Broker is fairly invisible on the front end, and while it requires little or no user training, it can look quite complicated to the implementers working behind the scenes.

This complexity is conceptual as much as technical, and modeling the back end isn't a routine task. Managers need to put together a dedicated, centralized messaging team, and give the members time to get up to speed.

Testing. IT managers should test a particular solution in their own environment before rolling it out. Vaughan suggests working through various client and server configurations, and performing stress and performance testing. Finally, managers should make sure their server-hardware platform is adequate, and determine what volume of messages their mainframes can handle.

Return to main story, "Prudential Finds Integration Is Key To Success."

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