How Not to Write Professionally – Emotional System Integration

You have all these great investments into infrastructure and software. Let’s draw a mental picture.  Infrastructure represents bridges and tunnels.  Software stands for masses of land.  But you do not really want all those islands to be indigenous.  You want all your pockets of data and applications talk to each other, or at least have capable, reliable translators along side.

Everything comes in Excel nowadays.  And Oracle did a great job to integrate JD Edwards with Excel.  Information is now seamlessly flowing in and out of Excel to and out of your JD Edwards system.  Do you wish sometimes that everything would be that easy?

As soon as your data leaves your JD Edwards system, it is no longer subjected to the same security and validation rules that you so painstakingly setup and maintained. How to make a data flow from JD Edwards trustworthy and auditable?  How to make it maintainable and expandable?

This is a typical System Integration task.  Leave nothing to chance: to an accidental user click or erroneous file naming mistake.  Automate.  Streamline.  Protect.  Luckily, systems can talk nowadays through many similar languages (OBDC) and understand various accents and dialects (CSV, XML).  Spice it up with encryption and secure transmission channels, and you almost have a solution.  But kids, don’t do it at home.  All the recipes books in the world will not replace the good restaurant experience.  Call the master, call the chef.

The main reason for using a professional in writing and tuning a reliable information flow is in its repetitions nature.  Remember, you will have to live with it for a long, long time. With cooking at home, you can always scrap the failed dish, but try to scrap something that connects, then breaks, then delivers, then breaks again and somehow almost works.  It is like a mediocre meal that lasts for years.  It is like a caviar dish with tiny scraps of glass in it – it is dangerous to eat, but too precious to through away.  It is hard to replace for the company, it is a bad taste for IT, it is even a source of pride and job security for some.

To avoid this, contact the men in-the-know. That is what we do.  That is another important aspect of our focus.  When you translate one word, you might use an online dictionary, but when you need both sides (both applications) to understand each other, you’ve better use a human translator, who has done this before.

Let’s do it. Let’s integrate together!