André LeClerc

André LeClerc is the head of the software architecture practice for Technology Development Associates, Inc., where he is active in designing, developing, training, consulting, and mentoring distributed component systems.

Mr. LeClerc has consulted to various Cutter clients, providing expert advice and reports on Internet application architecture and data architecture. In 1984, Mr. LeClerc was appointed vice president of Yourdon, Inc, where he created the ADA Software Engineering program for Yourdon's clients. Following his tenure at Yourdon, Inc., he developed an object and component architecture consulting practice of Fortune 500 clients and became a founding partner of Technology Development Associates. As such, he provides software architecture and component-based development advice to organizations such as Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, James Martin and Associates, and numerous others.

Mr. LeClerc has authored a book on structured PL/1, as well as a variety of articles, seminars, and tutorials on topics such as information modeling, data analysis, OO analysis and design, use case methods, Internet systems, software patterns, EAI/middleware, and J2EE architecture. He is the author of MOOD, a full lifecycle OO/UML methodology, and the Distributed Application Development (DAD) methodology.

The Trend Toward EAI

An Interview with André LeClerc, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

What trends are you seeing as you work with clients on integration projects?

The overall trend is obvious -- to Web-enable everything. The tendency is to slap a Web-enabled GUI in front of existing applications to open up the business to the public. Unfortunately, over the next year or so, a lot of these initiatives are going to fail. The back-end systems are not ready, and you can't put these things together with paper clips.

Java allows people to put a quick and dirty front end on a system. But when they try to architect their systems so they're tied together, they run into serious problems because they don't have a process view of the enterprise. They're trying to assemble a system from client to back-end database -- but it wasn't initially designed to allow that. People are running into the consequences of the last 20 years of bad design.

What should companies do?

They need to start building a process view of their enterprise, in other words, rearchitecting their business processes for e-business. Most companies are trying to build an e-business on top of their existing processes, but the businesses who will win this war are the ones that started to do process modeling ten years ago. To catch up, businesses need to build a business infrastructure around processes, using tools like UML activity models, IBM's LOVE tool, or Interfacing Technologies' FirstStep.

The next step is to build enterprise application integration (EAI) systems that implement those processes. For example, if you have an online catalog, anyone who's going to buy a product from you is going to have to be able to get data directly into the sales database. So, the concept of a sale has to be unified across all the business units. That's not the case right now on most sites. At one client, we built a system that made it look like you could get an insurance policy over the Web. But the closing time on the application was 24 hours because the actual work was being done in batch files in the background.

Currently, most business are not architected around their processes; they're architected around their technology. Unifying the technology around processes is the concept behind EAI. Once you have a process view of things, all the tools are there to build on.

Doing this successfully takes a lot of work. If you look at the companies that have succeeded, such as Fed Ex, Sprint, and MCI, you realize these are companies that can afford the cost of EAI, which is quite high right now. The cost is not in the tools; it's the cost of reorganizing to become a process-driven organization. That involves toppling a lot of fiefdoms, and it's a painful process.

What can IT do to help in this process?

They should introduce process modeling as a concept. Modeling got a bad name in the last couple of years, but you have to have an overall integration strategy. You don't go out and buy EAI and get a vendor to come in and install it. It's a strategy that requires the integration of numerous initiatives, including data warehousing, middleware, and supply-chain management. Introducing the process view of things is the only way to unite those efforts.

It's helpful to think of EAI as the second generation of process integration. In the 1990s, we had BPR. Now we have BPR-with-tools. BPR without tools was bound to fail because it called for reorganization without the means to implement the integrated systems. Today, we're able to rethink business processes and support them with workflow tools, process tools, integration tools, and consulting expertise.

This is a complex problem, so you must have support from the highest levels. CIOs have to lead the effort. Get in front of the parade -- if you're not thinking about EAI, you should be.