Industrial integration

InfoWorld - When Chief Technology Officer Phyllis Michaelides took the helm of megaconglomerate Textron Inc. two and a half years ago, she stared across a sea of software that had more tentacles than a jellyfish.
Textron's history of acquisitions and global manufacturing operations -- spanning E-Z-Go golf carts, the Cessna Aircraft Co. and industrial fasteners -- resulted in an IT hodgepodge. The Providence, R.I.-based corporate giant was swimming in legacy and silo-style packaged applications, disconnected directories, innumerable data formats and definitions, and rigid point-to-point application connections -- not to mention the cost of maintaining it all.
Taming this technical spaghetti first required getting Textron managers to think with an "enterprise mind" by selling business managers on large-scale integration and working to articulate business processes upfront, Michaelides says. Only then did an IT plan emerge to loosely tie systems into a central architecture, using a combination of messaging middleware, a unified LDAP-based directory, an enterprisewide portal and a shared data center.
"We really wanted to have one executing company enterprise, rather than a collection of companies. And this gave our project a business impetus and a good reason to connect things," says Michaelides, who is currently in the middle of the massive integration project.
Integration mandate
The effort to harness Textron's far-flung software empire into one cohesive, manageable infrastructure is indicative -- on a large scale -- of the type of challenges facing manufacturing CTOs as software integration moves up the IT priority ladder.
An AMR Research Inc. report released in May reveals that manufacturing companies are spending an average of $1.9 million annually on integration projects. Of that amount, 79% is plunked down on internal enterprise application integration (EAI), while 21% is allocated for business-to-business integration with partners and suppliers. The highest-tier manufacturers are forking out an average of $3 million per year on integration, the research indicates.
Meanwhile, the widespread acceptance of XML, as well as emerging standards for Web services, such as Simple Object Access Protocol, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, and Web Services Description Language, might remove some of the trepidation about launching complex projects. "We're already using XML across the board, and we will eventually use the Web services standards as they mature," says Michaelides, whose first technical integration chore involved cleansing all data so it mapped across systems.
Industrial integration
There are compelling reasons for CTOs to jump on the bandwagon. Integrating systems is a surefire way to leverage their existing IT assets. Plus, supply chain automation, EAI and business-to-business technology each promise ways to streamline internal