Informatica today announced the release of the industry’s first book about applying lean principles to the challenges of enterprise data and process integration, entitled Lean Integration: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility. Authored by noted data integration experts and Informatica executives John G. Schmidt and David Lyle, Lean Integration describes why the integration factory will be the dominant new “wave” of middleware for the next decade. It provides detailed best practices for implementing a lean integration strategy to align functions, eliminate waste and drive continuous improvements across vital data integration activities.

Lean integration is a management system that takes principles and practices derived from lean manufacturing and applies them to optimizing data and process integration on a sustainable basis. According to authors Schmidt and Lyle, lean integration teams typically realize 50 percent labor productivity improvements and 90 percent project lead-time reduction through value stream mapping and continuous efforts to eliminate non-value added activities. Lean Integration describes how to leverage lean techniques across the entire integration lifecycle. It includes establishing Integration Factories that bring the values of repeatability, standardization, highly automated processes, continuous measurement and improvement to all facets of any enterprise data integration project.

At a time when approximately 40 percent of the typical IT budget goes to integration, often with less-than-optimal results, Lean Integration provides a casebook for top IT management, enterprise architects, project leaders, data analysts and developers on how to:

• Establish integration as a business strategy and implement management disciplines that systematically address integration’s people, process, policy and technology dimensions.
• Deliver what the business needs while eliminating the waste and delays that characterize so many IT projects.
• Maximize business agility and support rapid change without compromising stability, quality, control or efficiency.
• “Optimize the whole, not just the parts” through the use of value stream mapping and metrics.
• Build in data quality and integration quality up-front for any project.
• Drive IT innovation through fact-based problem solving and automating routine tasks.

More information on lean integration can be found on the Integration Factory website.

Source: Informatica.