Domain Team:
Application Integration Team
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Application Integration
For 25 years the state of North Dakota has been developing and deploying computer applications to conduct state business. These applications have, by and large, been purpose built to meet a subset of an Agency's needs, an approach that has resulted in large silo like applications: applications and data for one business process exist in isolation from any other business process. This is not unusual: most large enterprises find, or have found, themselves in similar situations.
While these applications continue to serve the purpose for which they were designed and built, they do not meet needs that have arisen since they were implemented. How could they? Chief among these new needs are requirements for integrating, or sharing, the data within these Application Silos. Whether it be sharing of information by the various law enforcement agencies, or sharing of information between all the agencies with which businesses interact, or sharing information for the purposes of fostering economic development the data within these Silos must be made more widely available.
How does one meet the emerging business needs that require availability to data that resides in a number of silos? One could rewrite all of the relevant applications so that they all use a common data repository. However, this approach is almost always cost prohibitive. Moreover, what does one do when the data within this newly created repository must be integrated with data that resides somewhere else? Rewrite these applications yet again? It is more flexible, and usually much more cost effective, to integrate the existing applications, leaving the legacy functions intact to serve their original purpose while creating an infrastructure that can be used in the future when new needs arise that require integrating data from yet another set of applications.
The discipline of Application Integration addresses these issues and it is
the charge of the Application Integration Domain Team to provide the technical
architecture that the State of North Dakota will use in pursuing integration projects.
