Six Principles of Integration
The following six principles are essential for success in your data integration project:
1. Understand Motivations
In order to be clear on direction, it is important to spend the time to understand your own and others’ motivations at a personal and at an organizational level. There is a common reaction to data integration as “getting in my way” or as being police officers and stopping what is important to “me”.
3. Trust Is a Key in
Effective Data Integration
Trust is the glue that allows people to share, open up to looking at and improving data integration, and can result in huge buy-in versus a forced and less powerful way of implementing a data integration program.
5. Momentum Comes
from Involvement
Once motivations are understood and addressed, there is a clear vision and a trusting environment, then involvement and commitment usually follows. However, there are other principles of inclusion that can help gain more involvement and commitment.
2. Have a Clear,
Compelling, Common Vision
Understand where it is you are heading, why it is such a worthwhile place to go, and how other can benefit towards common goals. If there is an exciting vision that is well understood and communicated, and appeals to the common good of the people in the enterprise, then how can there not be a great deal of positive energy towards achieving it?
4. Learn from the Past
Why not learn what has worked and what has not worked and re-use instead of re-inventing?
6. Appreciate perspectives
versus being right
A symptom of separation is righteousness. When there is separateness, there are inconsistencies in data as well as in other areas. When people don’t acknowledge that there are many different perspectives that are all valid and instead insist on a right way of being or a “single version of the truth”, then it is very difficult to establish data integration. If people in data integration efforts such as a data management program harshly claim that their way is the “only” or “best” way without any flexibility, there is bound to be resistance.