Customer Situation

A large media company was facing very traditional enterprise integration challenges. The company had significant amounts of data, but access across the company was inconsistent. Data was spread out and housed within new cloud-based solutions and older legacy applications. 

The existing solution was a file-based ERP related function that was brittle, slow, expensive to scale, and not reusable. The complexity of the ineffective solution resulted in individual business units implementing their own integration processes and resulting in a data warehouse becoming a high-traffic resource. 

In contrast to the existing situation, the customer wanted a future-proof integration solution that could scale quickly and easily. Also, the solution needed to allow and support IT governance over one-off, shadow IT solutions. Focused on an event-driven design, the system needed to promote re-use in a pub-sub model, democratizing data availability by allowing business units ad-hoc discovery of objects via an API.

Solution Approach

Big Compass worked side-by-side with the client to develop a design for an Enterprise Data Hub (EDH). The EDH would offer a centralized, unified data source where diverse business units could rapidly access the data needed for their specific functions. Through multiple phases, Big Compass provided an ESB architecture design, an API strategy, and initial use cases. 

The ESB design included analysis and documentation for the creation of a webMethods environment, including server infrastructure, networking dependencies, and software configuration requirements. 

The API strategy focused on the integration with existing API taxonomy and services. 

Additionally, Big Compass helped the client with documented coding standards and best practices so the client’s support and development teams could own the applications and processes after the engagement.

Results

Once completed, the client had an Enterprise Data Hub design that met the needs of reusability and scalability while promoting data transparency to the broader organization. The “shovel-ready” design not only enabled increased and continued IT governance, but reduced IT involvement and lowered costs.