I am going to take a time out on my blog series outlining the IBM B2B Integration products and their capabilities. I'm just not as prepared as I should be, so I'll pick it up next round.
If you have followed our blogs or coffee break webinars, you know that much of our focus is on assisting customers in moving to the next level in their B2B integration services or maturing their B2B integration services. This could be determining that a company should upgrade from an EDI focused translator such as Gentran to a comprehensive integration suite such as B2B Integrator. Or it could be that a company would benefit from outsourcing their integration services rather than support them in-house.
There is a whitepaper written by Wipro called "Benchmarking The Enterprise's B2B Integration Maturity" that I think does an excellent job of showing the progression from initial integration to optimized integration. Below are the four levels of maturity outlined in the paper.
Initial Services
- point-to-point interfaces with little re-use
- manual trading partner on-boarding
- hodgepodge communications
- high-level of manual monitoring and support
Standardized Services
- standards are developed for processes, programs, and maps
- re-usable processes, programs, and maps
- consistent trading-partner on-boarding by using trading partner management tools
- centralized communications
- automated monitoring
Measurable Services
- consolidate to a single B2B integration solution for transformation and communication
- business process modeling
- tracking and visibility
- automated trading partner on-boarding
Optimized Services
- expand on single B2B integration solution by broadening the services available
- improve existing processes
- analyze and act on metrics
- consolidate communications to a managed file transfer (MFT) solution handling multiple interface types and protocols
These are my takeaways, but there is much more detail in the paper and a chart on page 5. I recommend taking a look yourself.
