“What the authors have set out here is a philosophy built on best practices from both the fields of manufacturing and software development, but they do so with examples that bring the material alive, come from real life, and offer specific, measurable actions and practical alternatives. This work is fantastic, not just from a technical standpoint; it has a maturity that’s vacant from other works, an understanding of internal business politics and human resources concerns, all the while wrapped in solid management principles and practices.”
—Kevin P. Davis, Senior Technical Architect
“Technology is a key enabler within any industry and a key success measure is the ‘alignment’ between business and information technology. Schmidt and Lyle provide practical advice for a fundamental shift in thinking, from IT as an internal services function to IT as an integral part of a company’s strategy, creating value for customers. IT internal and external service providers have to operate as one management team. Lean Integration presents compelling examples of how integration teams play a role in leadership, strategic planning, and IT governance as some of the critical factors in achieving organizational alignment.”
—Zahid Afzal, Executive Vice President/Chief Information Officer, Huntington National Bank
“In today’s world, enterprises struggle with increasing global competition, the need for speed to market, and the ability for IT to enable the strategic intent of the business. One of the core tenets of lean that many integration professionals lose sight of is the need to put the customer first. This book serves as a reminder to our fiduciary responsibility to leverage IT as a competitive tool for planning and execution.”
—James McGovern, Enterprise Architect, The Hartford
“This book should help the IT executive and practitioner, alike, align on goals and objectives that drive long-term value to their enterprise. The Integration Competency Center can drive as much or more value for the IT department than any other capital investment it will make in the next decade.”
—Clark T. Becker, Former SVP and CTO, Best Buy Co., Inc.
“In this highly communicative world, one filled with a high degree of turbulence and uncertainty, the one key that will separate successful businesses from the rest is their ability to be agile and wield just-in-time, focused, trustworthy information. I am extremely pleased to see that John and David have written on such an important topic.”
—Mark Albala, President, InfoSight Partners, LLC
“John Schmidt and David Lyle have written an important book with a new perspective on lean thinking in the software development world. This is a must-read for leaders in all functional areas.”
—Arthur V. Hill, Lindahl Professor and Professor of Operations and Management Science, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
“At OMG we have always believed that integration, repeatable processes and methodology, and high-quality, widely available standards were the missing links in the software world. Given the huge number of lessons to learn from other engineering and management sciences, it’s natural to apply the lessons of lean manufacturing to software production. John Schmidt has recognized the challenges and fought to integrate hard-won knowledge from other disciplines, and this book is a great example of what solid, clear, everyday lessons we can learn to make our organizations agile and innovative. Bravo!”
—Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group, Inc.
“Lean Integration is invaluable to any business that relies on technological integration with its customers to expand. This book utilizes lean manufacturing principles to create successful software development projects in a replicable and measurable approach. By successful projects, I mean high quality, quick to production, maintainable for the long term, and under budget for both implementation and ongoing support. As an executive and a Six Sigma Black Belt of an expanding business process outsourcing company that relies on the integration of disparate customer systems for its growth and success, I believe the lean approach outlined in this book is the roadmap to follow.”
—Howard L. Latham, Executive Vice President, API Outsourcing, Inc.
“Lean Integration is an excellent resource for anyone struggling with the challenges of performing integration for a complex enterprise. The authors have combined their experience to provide a practical roadmap for applying lean principles to the integration problem. If you are looking for an approach to tackle the integration chaos that exists in your environment, this book should be at the top of your reading list.”
—Steve J. Dennis, Integration Competency Center Director, Nike
“As costs of raw technology decline, superior practice will dominate IT value. Increasingly, it’s not enough to be clever: it’s essential to be efficient, and that’s what John Schmidt and David Lyle will help IT practitioners do with their new book, Lean Integration. Point-to-point connections grow with (roughly) the square of the number of connected things, but Schmidt and Lyle offer a better way. Rising above the spaghetti bowl to treat integration as a scalable process, they make it practical for enterprise IT to make the most of complementary services in the cloud—promising the attentive reader huge improvements in IT economics.”
—Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research, Salesforce.com, Inc.
“Lean Integration is a practical discovery not an invention. For this reason everyone will eventually be doing it.”
—Erwin Dral, Principal Product Manager, Informatica
“John Schmidt and David Lyle’s new book, Lean Integration: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility, is bound to shake up the software development industry. The authors show how to reduce costs and risks of software by applying lean management principles that force developers to focus on real customer/knowledge worker requirements to design quality into software the first time, from requirements definition to implementation and production operations. This is required reading for all information systems personnel who want to be on the cutting edge of quality management applied to software and systems engineering.”
—Larry P. English, author, Information Quality Applied: Best Practices for Business Information, Processes and Systems
Customer Reviews & Comments
John Schmidt and David Lyle have created an important and useful book, bringing to market an explanation of Lean Integration for many participants in the software development and implementation community. The book ranges from top-level overviews of lean software and integration practices, to detailed consideration of the use of canonical models in middleware. This is both a strength of the book - its comprehensiveness - and a weakness - it's easy to get lost in the richness of the material. The strength far outweighs the weakness in this case, and I highly recommend the book for anyone involved in large-scale enterprise or inter-enterprise software leadership.
The book starts with an executive summary, covering an overview of Lean in software and elsewhere, leading into a discussion of the "Integration Factory" concept that the authors have promulgated in other forums as well. This is an outstanding idea - that integration itself is a competency, and has repeatable dimensions that can be standardized and reused. John and David draw from Lean Manufacturing ideas around elimination of waste through standardization of process, which of course has significant relevance in this context. However, they do not draw strongly on the ideas of Lean Product Development (LPD), which are of equal value in this context. The LPD ideas centered on People (towering technical competence, module development teams), Process (lightweight project management, integrating events, "agile"), and tools (concise communication, creating consensus) could enrich this "factory" idea. Unfortunately, over the last few decades of software engineering the rigid process definers and followers have been able to foist this pernicious idea that software development = factory work, and the balancing idea that software development = knowledge creation work has in many cases gotten short shrift. This is a bit of a nit to pick, as the book has very valuable discussions of empowering teams and agile processes, but it's my favorite nit to pick (if you are interested in exploring further, check out my book A Tale of Two Systems: Lean and Agile Software Development for Business Leaders).
The second section of the book is about applying lean principles. Here, there are chapters about a half-dozen principles, such as "Empower the Team" and "Build Quality In." Each chapter has useful ideas and most have one or more case studies.
The final section is a more detailed dive into implementation practices. These chapters cover topics such as financial management, methodology, metadata, architecture, and integration systems. The material is very wide ranging, from building business process management systems, to styles of web services and data management. Whereas for me the first two sections were a nice read, these chapters were detailed enough to merit coming back to as a sort of reference guide.
Throughout the book, the authors display broad and deep knowledge of the topics, and exceptional delivery-focused common sense. I love the integration laws they promulgate, including "there is no end state," "there are no universal standards," and "information adapts to meet local needs." Practical, experienced, and conceptual - a rare combination of qualities in any information technology professional. Take advantage of John and David's willingness to put this all into writing for us, and buy the book!
