ICS Solutions

BizTalk Centre of Excellence

Creating your own interface factory

  • Demand
  • Develop
  • Deploy
  • Maintain

The BizTalk Centre of Excellence is a complete, end to end BizTalk solution to address all of your interface requirements. Business and IT project teams will know how best to use the infrastructure, how best to ensure their project interface(s) are a success and how to ensure their interface needs are delivered on time and within budget.

By following the guidance, governance and controls that the Centre of Excellence (CoE) imposes, code reuse occurs and best practice is always followed, implemented and enhanced.

Demand Generation

In order to maximise the business benefit of the BizTalk CoE, each project interface needs to be validated against the predefined patterns (blueprints) that have been developed by the CoE.

In addition, the various project teams also need to know how best to utilise this capability with the CoE influencing the project teams to ensure that interfaces that go through the CoE do so in a friction free way.

Finally, there is also the need to decline interface work if there is not a strong fit between the project interface needs and the capabilities of the BizTalk infrastructure that has been defined by the CoE and suitable alternatives recommended.

Develop

In order for the CoE to function like a development factory, the software engineering process needs to be set up for the factory environment. This requires the design and implementation of a specific development approach that meets the needs of the business and address development techniques that are suitable for BizTalk related activities such as Agile, Waterfall, or Test Led Development.

Once the development technique has been identified and all of the tools selected, the factory can be configured to provide the scalable, repeatable systems and methods that ensure an efficient operation for building the interfaces in a repeatable and cost effective way.

Deploy

Once the factory is up and running, the business needs to be able to rapidly and consistently test and deploy the software to the live environment in a manner that fits in with the business needs and the business drivers.

Maintain

Once the new interfaces have been deployed to the live environment, a reliable and cost effective life cycle management approach is needed in order to maintain the performance of the BizTalk infrastructure and scale the capability in line with business needs and agreed SLA’s. This also brings in the existing tools used by the IT department to monitor and maintain systems and ensures that the specific BizTalk activities are managed through the same interface if possible.

Project Office

This function provides the operation control for the BizTalk CoE and the central planning management where all of the aspects of the blueprint are developed, managed, maintained and updated. This is the heart of the CoE where all decisions on priorities and workload are made and communicated.

Re Usable Assets, Methods and IP

The key to the smooth and efficient running of the CoE is to steadily build a repository of artefacts and code patterns so that, as more and more projects use the CoE, more reuse is taking place - reducing the cost of the subsequent interface development each time a project is completed. Linking this into best practice and developments in the market will ensure the CoE is more likely to create valuable and cost saving IP and enable the business to move towards a true Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

ICS Solutions BizTalk Centre of Excellence

BizTalk Centre of Excellence

To speak to ICS about the BizTalk Advantage Program please email us here.