Continuing to look for short-term solutions to an increasingly complex situation will just mean more fingers in the dike. People need to sit down and really understand how they view their customers differently from other parts of the organization. They will then need to reconcile their view with others to come up with a single enterprise view of the customer. Only then can the technical team take the ball and run with it. This painful realization must be globally reached before EAI can be more than an academic exercise.
Customer orientation implies changes to business processes.
These are then followed by technical changes to support them. The technology only enables implementation of the business plan. Here again, the success of the EAI effort rests with executive management. This column has discussed the need for decisive executive direction in tackling the organizational issues on which successful EAI depends. He has worked extensively in data and process modeling, data integration, data quality, and business intelligence applications for more than 15 years.