My Eye-Opener
My first project out of college was as part of a massive government project, with thousands of interfaces and hundreds of integration partners. Part of my job on this project was to attend endless workshops and create giant enterprise level diagrams connecting all systems to show what data was being exchanged. This data was shown to management for visibility and would be the foundation for the future development on the brand-new middleware product call SAP XI. As a fresh faced and eager consultant, I pushed Visio 2000 to its very limits. At the end of months long workshops (Discovery), we used a plotter to print the diagram, and it was enormous. I could replace the wallpaper in my house with the results of the diagram and have plenty left over. But it was a great lesson for me in the value of visualizing integration projects because it was useful for the project executives to see a wholistic view of the environment. They thanked me profusely for the effort – this was large organization with many sub orgs that worked independently, and they had genuinely never seen an enterprise view of what an integration environment looked like.
Just so you can imagine, this is kind of what it looked like, only much, much bigger:
Lessons Learned
The workshops I attended were necessary to gather information. Each workshop was for a siloed organization. Often there was no documentation, but Employee #1 over there had been handling the file transfer for 20+ years and knew it in and out. At the end of the workshops, I was proud to have a completed diagram, but it was nearly impossible to maintain because there were multiple organizations moving in many different directions. I also got a crash course into advanced mathematical plane theory as lines had to cross due to limitations of drawing on a 2d plane, and parts of the diagram were crowded with lines intersecting and crossing all over the place, making it harder to read than the NYC bus map. I also had to zoom in and out constantly to get to the part of the diagrams that were relevant to any discussion, and which would cause Visio to lag and crash frequently. Due to the giant scale, it was not very practical to work on a single screen 15” laptop. And at the end of the day, most people would only care about a small portion of the diagram during discussions.
Improving the line of sight
The situation where you have multiple parties working independently, with no clear visual of the integration environment happened on my next two projects (and on many more beyond that). Due to technology improvements as well as smaller scopes, these diagrams were much easier to produce and maintain, taking days or weeks instead of months (Go Visio 2007), depending on the number of integrations. Sometime around 2010, I started using some of the same tricks that the FIGAF migration analysis tool uses to retrieve data from the PI environment. This allowed me to get information to generate diagrams much faster than ever before, because I didn’t have to review the PO environment manually when I went to new projects. I also found that the giant diagram was useful, but diagrams specific to groups (such as by functional area or process), could help business users speak the same language as technical users. It was a lot easier to identify problems because someone can simply point to something on the diagram. Visualizing integration projects helps cuts through the fog, making communication easier.
Visualize Integration Projects to See Clearly
Over the next 15 years, I continued to streamline how to visually represent client environments. Now at Happy Integrations, we can create integration diagrams almost instantly. We can also create diagrams at various levels (enterprise, functional, or manually selected grouping), so they can be specific to our audience. This helps with scoping and onboarding as we try to get an understanding of a new client environment.
Our diagrams give a focal point for integration discussions. They also help accurately display and convey that we understand the legacy environment while capturing the inputs and outputs as you transition to BTP. Not only that, but since our diagrams are procedurally generated, they are free from human error or someone’s memory of how things work. We still do a manual review before sending diagrams to our clients to ensure the quality/readability – because when procedurally generated diagrams go wrong, it can look like a ball of yarn. And while that may be fun for my cats, it’s not nearly as much fun for our clients!
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