Enterprise Integration
Estate-wide integration strategy, standards and shared infrastructure.
5 to work through
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advanced
A workforce platform must integrate with hundreds of external systems with wildly different reliability. What integration architecture scales, and what does not?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
An ecosystem of many business lines needs to share data and events. Should integration be point-to-point, through a central hub, or event-driven? What decides it?
2 min answer -
advanced
An estate has 140 point-to-point integrations between 20 systems. What is the problem and what would you do?
2 min answer -
advanced
An estate has 34 systems, 210 running interfaces, and a proposal to introduce a canonical hub. Before deciding, estimate the annual engineering cost of the current integration surface and how it changes when one system's schema is revised. Which number should decide the proposal?
3 min answer -
advanced
In 2017 The New York Times described replacing a web of API and feed integrations with a single ordered Kafka log - the Monolog - holding every published asset as the source of truth, with back-end systems consuming from it. What forced that change, what did it cost, and where would copying it be a mistake?
3 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Enterprise Integration
How applications across an estate exchange data — where the topology matters more than the technology and canonical models are the recurring trap.
metricIntegration Change Amplification
The number of independently owned systems that must change when one system revises its interface - the measure that decides whether an integration es…
conceptIntegration Landscape
The inventory of connections between systems, which is usually larger, less documented and more expensive than the application inventory itself.
patternIntegration Log of Record
An ordered, retained log that every consuming system reads from, replacing point-to-point integrations so that a new consumer can rebuild its entire …
Neighbouring topics
Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Technology Architecture
Platforms, runtimes and infrastructure standards across the estate.
Capability Maps in EA
The stable frame for hanging investment, ownership and health off.
Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
Application Rationalisation
Retire, consolidate, replatform — and why retirement is under-applied.
Technology Standards
Guidance that teams follow because it helps, not because it is mandated.
Technology Radar
Adopt, trial, assess and hold — with movement, dates and owners.
Reference Architectures
Pre-approved templates for recurring solution shapes.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
TOGAF
The ADM as a checklist, tailored rather than followed literally.
EA Frameworks
Zachman, FEAF and others — vocabulary rather than method.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Paved Roads
Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
InnerSource
Open-source collaboration practices applied inside an organisation.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.