10 Weeks to Lean Integration by John Schmidt.
From the post:
Lean Integration is a management system that emphasizes focusing on the customer, driving continuous improvements, and the elimination of waste in end-to-end data integration and application integration activities.
Lean practices are well-established in other disciplines such as manufacturing, supply-chain management, and software development to name just a few, but the application of Lean to the integration discipline is new.
Based on my research, no-one has tackled this topic directly in the form of a paper or book. But the world is a big place, so if some of you readers have come across prior works, please let me know. In the meantime, you heard it here first!
The complete list of posts:
Week 1: Introduction of Lean Integration (this posting)
Week 2: Eliminating waste
Week 3: Sustaining knowledge
Week 4: Planning for change
Week 5: Delivering fast
Week 6: Empowering the team
Week 7: Building in quality
Week 8: Optimizing the whole
Week 9: Deming’s 14 Points
Week 10: Practical Implementation Considerations
I don’t necessarily disagree with the notion of reducing variation in an enterprise. I do think integration solutions need to be flexible enough to adapt to variation encountered in the “wild” as it were.
I do appreciate John’s approach to integration that treats it as more than a technical problem. Integration (as other projects) is an organization issue as much as it is a technical one.