EAI

Most BI architecture found within enterprise today does not exploit the integration capacity offered by more recent technology. These are more typically leveraged by other application systems in the operational area inside the enterprise IT infrastructure. But before giving some thoughts on the reason why (more on this in a coming blog), first I’d like to give more detail on the concept of application integration. Traditionally, this subject has been referred to as the TLA EAI.

Instead of relying on a more prose-like form, I thought to make use of the mind map diagram for describing the concept. I really like Mind map as a way to illustrate, navigate, and represent knowledge on specific subject.

So here is my mind map of EIA (using FreeMind ) .

1. static view:








2. Dynamic View at Mind42



The mind map is hosted by mindshare.com which is still in beta, so may not be available at all times!


Here is the same dynamic view embedded as iframe :





From my personal observation when it comes to EAI, BI applications typically limit its integration to:

• For the upstream spectrum (i.e. fetching data in) : Bacth-file or database loading in otherwords ETL processing.
  
• For the downsteam spectrum (i.e. disseminating the info out) : things usually are limited to sending flat files to external system at scheduled time. Here I only refer to integration between different system applications without including desktop user-type application, where things are different.

Martin