Discovering your Application Integration Points by Anticlue

As a new pm or an old one, a key component of any upgrade or replacement project is to discover your integration touch points for the old system. For most application integration is becoming more prevalent with automation and saving paper. It is important to discover all of the integration points validate their value with the system owner, and develop a plan to maintain them.

What is Integration?

Integration comes in many forms. At its most basic level, integration enables the connectivity of systems and applications across the enterprise. One of the basic points is the Hospital Registration System, The Coding and Grouping System, The Hospital Billing Systems. Commonly these are three separate applications but the data between the applications is shared extensively. In order to share information between the systems they may be integrated through middleware as an integration engine or with point to point interfaces. Instead of being silos of information, they are now connected. Another example would be integration to your email system. Over time email has become the killer application and has touch points to smart phones, web site links, pbx voice mails, faxing and other applications. Your email box has become the centralized point of communications and alerts for you.

Discovering Integration Points

Over the years, the level and quality of the documented integration points may not be up to snuff. So when replacing or upgrading a new system it is important to take inventory of what integration points are in place. A good place to start is to review the existing documentation for the application. Afterwards talk to the hl7 integration team and the batch programming integration team. Find out if there are other touch points done via a report/data entry combination. For large scale system implementation across many departments often a preliminary survey is used. After you have completed the integration discovery, review the results with the sponsor and stakeholders. Technology is integrating in new and exciting ways a nurse call message of a patient fall out of bed alert can be sent to the chart, the VOIP wi-fi phone or the blackberry, so it is important to have a graceful cutover when upgrading or replacing systems, and diligently test all integration components for customer acceptance.

Maintaining Integration Points

Another critical aspect of discovery is documenting where and how applications are integrated. Several tools commonly used are :

• Application Integration Diagram
• Master Data Flow for the organization
• Master Process Flow for the organization

If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also want to check out:

• Just Another Interface
• Interfacing to a previously Siloed System
• HL7 Interface Engines

0 Comments to “Discovering your Application Integration Points”

Please share your thoughts and suggestions

Name (required)

Email (required) (will not be published)

Website URL