Like most organizations today, you undoubtedly are reengineering your business processes to adapt to an environment that is defined by constant change. If your company makes products or delivers services, chances are your customers are constantly driving demand for offerings that deliver better value. If your organization is part of the public sector, it is likely contending with changing mandates, regulatory schemes, or funding environments.

In order for your technology infrastructure to support the enterprise, that technology must embrace change. The best solution is to isolate all the changes in a single, manageable integration layer that adapts to change.

Industry vendors are constantly releasing new versions that add or change functionality. Meanwhile, underlying platforms such as Java, Microsoft.NET, and Web services are evolving.

Building cohesive processes that withstand the test of time requires a delicate balancing act that keeps pace with the change going on all around you. The challenge is compounded by the reality that most core processes often involve multiple systems. For instance, entering a product order could involve:

• The CRM system that owns the customer record
• The ERP system that handles business transactions
• The supply-chain system that is necessary for making delivery commitments

To serve your customers effectively, the connections between these systems must continue to work. The problem is, whenever any source system changes, the connections often break. Effectively troubleshooting and repairing the breaks between enterprise systems increasingly calls for specialized skill sets that most IT organizations lack or can't afford.

In particular, you need a framework so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time you need a new connection. When your ERP provider adds new functionality or your CRM vendor adds new Web services interfaces, you can concentrate on designing the business processes, rather than troubleshooting broken connections or hand-coding new adapters.

Adaptive frameworks isolate the moving parts that are essential to making your core processes run. They provide a central point where adapters that prepackage the interfaces to your core business systems reside, and they make common services – such as support for application programming interfaces, source-target data transformation, event routing, process management, and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) – available from those interfaces.

Adaptive frameworks are essential because few IT organizations today have the skill sets, time, or budgets to tackle the inevitable challenges in maintaining the connections between mission-critical systems. Maintaining and repairing standalone, proprietary connections, or keeping pace with the latest Web services standards, drains time and money away from more strategic initiatives that your organization requires.

iWay Software is delivering adaptive frameworks that provide adapters that are easily reused. Just as we are the adapter factory for leading integration providers such as BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sonic, the iWay Adaptive Framework allows our experienced staff to create and maintain the adapters "in our plant," while your team focuses on developing the core processes central to your mission.

Although a new trend in some industries, outsourced production has been a mainstay across many manufacturing sectors. At Philips Consumer Electronics (PCE), the company is focusing internal activity on product development, assembly, marketing, and branding, while production of nonvital components and parts is outsourced as much as possible.

The result is the need to redouble efforts to maintain and continue improving quality. With partners becoming part of the equation, reporting became more important than ever. PCE chose WebFOCUS, particularly because the company's existing failure registration and reporting (FRR) functionality could be quickly and easily upgraded. Covering 28 internal and outsourced production sites, WebFOCUS provides an easy-to-use reporting solution easily customized by end users. Reducing fixed annual costs by 130,000 euros, the system paid for itself within one year. "On top of that, there are the returns from process improvements," says Koos Dekker, general manager for the Purchasing Process and Support Group. PCE is already working on the next function: expanding existing reporting with financial information.

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine. To provide feedback go to www.informationbuilders.com/insightstalkback

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