B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

I often sit and listen to clients talk about their EDI environments – sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad.  What I find most important during these conversations is ensuring I understand everything they have and the direction they are heading.  

To obtain this key information, you must ask a lot of questions.  It may take several conversations before earning the trust of the client so they may provide you with many details, but evenutally you get there. 

A car with no steering wheel or controls?  Google’s latest invention is getting a lot of hype, a fully self-driving car!  In a recent article on CNN, it touts this new invention as being a cross between a VW Bug and a golf cart.  Is the world really ready to embrace a technology that gives up all control and relies on a computer to get you home safely?  Integration is taking over our lives from business systems, personal gadgets, and now cars.

We talk about integration a lot but is it time to shift from just “integration” to “automation and integration”?  Not only are we constantly searching for ways to integrate our systems but we’re looking to remove human control from the process. 

I am a fan of the History Channel and one of my guilty pleasures is watching Swamp People.  It is crazy to me how people want to hunt Alligators, an animal that can live up to a hundred years and grow to 13-15 feet long or longer.  If you have never watched the show, the hunters put bait on a line to catch them and then they have to fight with them to get to a quarter sized kill shot and haul them in the boat.  Most people struggle and fight with the 600 pound monsters until they can get to the kill spot.  I saw a different approach on a recent episode.  Liz and her daughter (the only female hunters on the show),  started off pulling and tugging the line like every other time but this time the alligator was wrapped around the tree like dogs do with their leashes.  The line was very close to snapping and they would have lost the prized alligator and $650.  Liz decided she had to try a different approach and gave the alligator a whole lot of slack and waited for him to calm down.  This surprised and confused the alligator and he decided to come up out of the water to look and see what happened out of curiosity.  As soon as he surfaced, the fight was over.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with EDI……..

We attend and sponsor a variety of industry and solutions provider events throughout the year that deal with business and data integration.  REMEDI has participated in two such events in the last several weeks.  I am amazed by the differences in some of these events, and drivers of those that organize them, and here are some of my observations.  

At the beginning of the year my family decided to sponsor our first child from Honduras.  The country is bordered by Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Honduras is home to several important cultures and their population exceeds eight million.  They are most notable for their production of minerals, coffee, tropical fruit, etc…