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March 7, 2005 (Computerworld) --
The United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta recently faced an integration problem that's all too familiar to IT managers. The charity, which provides a variety of services to over 4 million children and adults, needed to provide fund-raising campaign workers with a uniform view of the information it had on its donors and aid recipients. Unfortunately, that information was scattered across three applications.
"Our campaign people would have to look into several different databases and have two or three different windows open, trying to match the various fields of information they needed to get a 360-degree view of our donors and volunteers," explains CIO Elaine Mitchell Norman.
But while the organization's experience is fairly common, the method it chose to solve it isn't. Instead of coding or purchasing a new application or attempting to use an enterprise application integration (EAI) or data integration system on the back end, the United Way opted for a front-end approach.
First, it replaced its contact management software with a sales force automation system from application service provider Salesforce.com Inc. Then it used Above All Studio, an integration tool from Above All Software Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., to link information and functions from other applications into an overlay interface for Salesforce.com. Above All's graphical user interface, which enables semitechnical users to map functions, was a boon to United Way, says Mitchell Norman.
"We don't have huge staffs of programmers or huge budgets for contractors," she says. "The graphical [interface of Studio] allows you to see data relationships, so someone with SQL experience can make relationships between the data in the systems." Now, campaign workers access all the data they need from one screen. "They log into Salesforce, and the data they need is there," says Mitchell Norman.
As the United Way scenario illustrates, a top-down approach to integration can offer significant benefits in situations when full-blown EAI is unnecessary.
"It's appropriate if you're trying to replicate a manual process where you need to hop among a dozen different applications to complete a task," says Teresa Jones, an analyst at Butler Group in Hull, England. "Rather than go into one application, write down a number, then key that into a second application, you can integrate that into one screen that looks like a single application but with the underlying applications still there."
That's different, she notes, than simple data integration in which databases share data. User interface integration implies integration of functionality as well as data. Such integration can be achieved with a variety of technologies, including the following:
- A services assembly and orchestration product like Above All Studio.
- An interface-reuse technology, such as a programmatic interface server like Jacada Ltd.'s Fusion, which developers can use to create an interface that can input or retrieve data from underlying applications, or Corizon's User Process Management software, which assembles new interfaces from bits of existing ones.
- Rich-client technology, such as products from Nexaweb Technologies Inc., JackBe Corp. or Macromedia Inc.
- Interactive portlets in a portal, like IBM's WebSphere Portal or Plumtree Software Inc.'s portal product.
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