The key to success when designing corporate architecture is choosing the right architectural style. The main thing here is to see the factors that show what principles should be applied here and now. These factors depend essentially on the company itself.
Architectural Styles
If a company is in the development stage, experimenting, if it needs to solve problems quickly, ideas about creating a unified integration environment and applying modern solutions may fail because the company is simply not ready for them. In such conditions, it is necessary to learn to live with the “patchwork quilt” style. Although this style is disliked by many because its use can lead to problems, many companies (even large ones) live with this paradigm.
“Weak” integration emphasizes the creation of an integration suite to establish interoperability between different, best-of-breed systems.
“Strong” integration involves ERP systems and a truly integrated information space.
Large companies always exist in a heterogeneous environment with many systems with different styles, but in any company you need to understand what style makes sense to apply, whether you should switch to a new style or need to wait.
It is very important to be able to recognize the “bells” that indicate the need to use a particular architectural style. For example, when problems related to loss of clients, increase of data processing time, increase of activity volumes, deterioration of data consistency level are regularly accumulated, it is obvious that it is time to move to “strong” integration – to implement a good system and make an integrated IT environment.
As a counterbalance to this, we can cite a situation when fully integrated ERP system modules cease to meet functional requirements in any areas. For example, our warehouse module became very complicated and it became clear that part of the function should be separated into a separate WMS-class system, i.e. we should switch to “weak” integration.
We should not fail to mention that nowadays, under the influence of the high rate of changes and the shift of emphasis from processes and systems to data management, a new type of architecture is beginning to form, which can be conditionally called “Data Integration”. However, the description of data integration is beyond the scope of this article, so we will not delve into this topic.