Structural View discovery intermediate

Integration Landscape Diagram

Every interface between systems, with its mechanism, direction, frequency and owner — the artifact that tells you what a migration will actually break.

Integration Programme Merger & Acquisition Integration Legacy Migration Cloud-Agnostic Hybrid Cross-Industry Architecture Review Board Engineering Operations & SRE

flowchart LR
  crm["CRM"]
  oms["Order Mgmt"]
  erp["ERP"]
  wms["WMS"]
  bill["Billing<br/><i>mainframe</i>"]
  dw[("Warehouse")]
  ptnr["Partner"]

  crm -->|"I-01 · REST · on demand"| oms
  oms -->|"I-02 · SFTP CSV · nightly"| erp
  oms -->|"I-03 · MQ · near real time"| wms
  wms -->|"I-04 · REST · on demand"| oms
  erp -->|"I-05 · flat file · nightly"| bill
  bill -->|"I-06 · DB link · nightly"| dw
  oms -->|"I-07 · CDC · continuous"| dw
  ptnr -->|"I-08 · AS2 EDI · hourly"| oms
  oms -->|"I-09 · AS2 EDI · hourly"| ptnr

What it is

The interface inventory, drawn. Every link is numbered and carries its mechanism and frequency, because those two facts determine what happens when either end moves. A numbered link maps to a row in a companion catalogue holding payload, volume, owner, error handling and the contract reference.

When you produce it

Before any migration, decommissioning or acquisition integration. The number of interfaces is almost always larger than anyone's estimate, and the direct database links are almost always the ones nobody remembered.

Who reads it

Migration teams, who read it as a work list. Operations, who read it as a failure-mode list. Architects, who use it to argue for a smaller number of better-defined interfaces.

What good looks like

Every link numbered, and the numbers used elsewhere.
Mechanism and frequency on the line. "Integrates with" is not information.
Direct database and file-share links are drawn, not tidied away — they are the ones that break.
Owner per interface, on both sides.
Sourced from something observable — a gateway, a broker, network flow data — rather than from memory.

Common mistakes

Only drawing the API integrations, because those are the documented ones.
Omitting frequency, which is what tells you whether an outage is noticed in seconds or the next morning.
Treating it as static. New interfaces appear constantly; without a refresh mechanism the map is a snapshot of a year ago.