Challenges

The adequate integration strategy?

The requirements from IEC 12207 with regards to integration and traceability are the foundation for SPICE, as you can see in this image. It is very obvious that no current ALM solution can cover entirely all aspects of the complete lifecycle. In most cases, the integration of the supplier (supply) in the LPI area is missing.

Additionally it is not realistic that the majority of companies will be implementing a single-vendor ALM platform or that they can cover all domains from end-to-end by a single ALM platform. This means that there will always be process gaps in the SPI area, which can be closed only with a solution for „development process integration“, such as the agosense.symphony platform.

But not only is there a focus on the demand for integration of heterogeneous system environments itself: IT managers often have to justify the (continued) usage of existing legacy systems, especially from an economical point of view.

The adequate integration strategy!

In many companies so called „point-to-point“ integrations can be found. These integrations usually have the process of their corresponding disciplines implemented directly and are now – due to the dynamics of processes - extremely cost intensive in regards to maintenance and support. Additionally, the complexity of operations increases incrementally with each new component that has to be integrated.

Over time, development, maintenance and operations of these integrations have slowly established very cost intensive parallel IT organisations in many companyies.

These integrations are usually built and maintained within the functional departments themselves – and the reasons therefore are obvious: development organisations not only have the know-how, but even more important, they are usually very close to the customer and are able to react much faster to requested changes than a central IT department (e.g. if changes are requested).

On the other hand, functional departments spend a big portion of their productive time on the support, maintenance and modification of these integrations – valuable time, which is usually intended for product development and research. Additionally they are not able to provide an adequate operational concept (i.e. high availability, clustering, etc.).

Now the question is: how do we get out of this dilemma? And the answer is: agosense.symphony! Next: » Solution