Businesses today need to be able to respond to opportunities and changing economic climates. IT infrastructure has always been an impediment to the agile company because technologies for integrating software, data sources, and business partners cannot support or withstand much change without beginning to incur exponential instability. Stone Bond's IIP provides an essential element of achieving the "agile" enterprise that can respond to changing competitive landscapes.

Stone Bond Technologies’ Integration Integrity Process, U.S. Patent No. 7,065,746, establishes an elegantly simple mechanism for automating the entire process of managing change in any integrated applications environment. An integrated environment implies complex interdependencies. Any time a change is made, IIP prevents the potential catastrophic side effects of crashing systems or bad decisions because of bad information.

• IIP performs impact analysis every time any change is detected in an application, data source, business process, or element of integration such as interfaces, business rules, etc.
• Once the potentially impacted elements are identified, IIP starts up its workflow management process which notifies the owners, with detailed information.
• The owner either notifies IIP that the change is OK or makes a change in his object to accommodate.
• All changes are held pending until completely resolved, then are automatically rolled out in the appropriate order.
• IIP maintains a full audit trail of changes, along with versioning on integration components.

As integration projects reach the final stages of completion the difficulty of managing the integrated system becomes painfully apparent. Without a business process in place to manage ongoing changes to the integration, the benefits achieved from integration will diminish over time. IIP is designed to help ensure the integrity of the integration with respect to business processes and system impact. If there is a change in a data source or in an application, IIP will make sure that the affected people, processes, and systems are appropriately notified, and the roll-out of change is sequenced and managed carefully.

While IIP is designed so that it can be used in any integrated environment, using IIP along with Enterprise Enabler^® provides an even more robust change management environment. Enterprise Enabler is the only integration platform that has a built-in facility such as IIP to support management of change across the entire system integration. IIP leverages components from Enterprise Enabler to build and manage metadata and to access and monitor hundreds of types of data sources and destinations.

Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) 

SOA is a growing trend as an architecture and approach for implementing re-usable software components and defining formats for data that is passed among applications. While the concept of standardizing for reusability is an important one for reducing time-to-implement as well as maintenance over time, in reality it is very difficult to anticipate all of the future desired uses of any data type or service, change is inevitable. IIP can watch for changes that could impact a web service enabled environment. For instance, if the XML structure of a web service does not meet the expected format, IIP will do an impact analysis, notify responsible parties, and manage the cascading discovery and reconciliation of the impact. IIP provides a level of assurance in the integrity of the SOA platform.

Data Warehouse - Extending the Life and Facilitating Evolution over Time 

Virtually every large company has implemented and is implementing one or multiple data warehouses to consolidate data for reporting, data mining, and decision-making. Implementation of a data warehouse is a big investment as is its maintenance over time. Because the value of the data warehouse is fully dependent on the ability to get correct data on a regular basis from scores of data sources, the integrity and dependability of the interfaces is essential. Since there are many data sources involved, some of which may be as volatile as a spreadsheet, changes are inevitable. Over time, applications will be switched out for others, updates will be implemented, and programmers will make changes to the interfaces from the applications to the data warehouse. IIP can be quickly set up to watch all of the data sources for changes that could impact the quality of the data or cause a system crash. It will then notify the appropriate individuals and assist in reconciling the change.

There are many data warehouses in a state of disuse because of the difficulty of making the inevitable changes over time. IIP can breathe new life into these and can ensure that a data warehouse can evolve easily to reflect the changing business demands.

Sarbanes-Oxley 

The Sarbanes-Oxley regulations are forcing the issue to the extent currently possible on the stability and auditability of IT systems. IIP can significantly reduce the probability of erroneous data being generated because of changes in the underlying infrastructure. By constantly monitoring for change and managing its resolution, complete with audit trails, IIP can help to eliminate unintended (or intended) consequences of system changes or file corruption. Where IIP is tied tightly to a secure integration development platform, as Stone Bond’s IIP is with Enterprise Enabler, the monitoring and change management can include all of the technical integration components. That means that no programmer can make any change anywhere along the data flows without it being detected and logged with full audit trail of who changed what, when.

IT Development Organization: Enabling the Agile Corporation 

Information technology organizations can be characterized as spanning between two different types of environments. The first is a large corporate development group that has very rigid procedures for development and deployment of software, databases, and the integration among them. This organization used three (or four) separate environments to stage from development to testing/quality assurance to production, and every change, update, or new system passes, at least theoretically, through these mirrored environments to ensure the stability of the production environment. At the other end of the spectrum, the only practical manner to handle certain types of situations, such as in an operating plant, is to apply changes carefully and directly to the production systems. Both of these environments can draw important benefits from an IIP implementation.

The first development environment has many programmers working on different systems at the same time. Changes are made, new systems are developed, old systems are upgraded to new versions, and the integration among them is adjusted, and redeployed. While there are usually procedures in place to make sure a structural or integration change will not impact any other system or work being done, often even the best of intentions cannot ensure that every point of impact can be determined, and certainly the cascading implications are daunting. With IIP in place, changes would be automatically detected, the potential impact determined, and the cascading resulting changes would be managed with an automated human/computer reconciliation process. If a programmer makes a change, it will be held pending while the impact is determined, and he will see how many points of impact there are and who owns them. If he decides to go ahead with the change, the “owners” of impacted components are notified, and can determine if they need to make adjustments to accommodate the change. This can become a complex network of impacted elements of the interdependent systems. IIP will reconcile and then roll out the changes.

In the second case, changes will be handled the same way, but will protect from impact in a live production environment.