Fitting the skills together

Demand for integration skills will soar as more IT departments attempt to equip their businesses with more useful, flexible and interoperable systems and services.

Whether technology departments are pushing through one-off projects in areas such as business intelligence (BI) and content management, or attempting more fundamental transformation through the adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA), it is clear they will need to acquire the right skills to integrate such projects, whether through in-house training, recruitment or external third-party providers.

Acquiring the lower-level technical integration skills will not necessarily be a problem, says analyst Steve Craggs, director of Lustratus Research. “Obviously, you’re going to need some skills in the tools and technologies you choose to use,” he says. “But today many of the tools on offer are fairly intuitive and easy to use. Of course, you will need a certain amount of training, but I don’t think that’s where the main skills challenges lie.”

Organisations will either use proprietary integration tools, in which case they should expect adequate training and support from the vendor, or they will choose to adopt open standards, such as XML, Java and the SOA enterprise service bus (ESB). There should be a fairly ready supply of open standards skills as such technologies increasingly become part of integration specialists’ must-have skills set.

But if organisations choose to adopt SOA for mission-critical systems ­ and analyst Gartner predicts that four out of five companies will have taken the SOA route by 2010 ­ the real integration skills challenges for IT departments will be at a higher level, says Craggs. SOA involves a fundamental change to the way firms think about IT ­ namely, as a series of interoperable business services, rather than as discrete IT systems.

“Organisations will undoubtedly need people who are skilled at writing services as opposed to skilled at writing code on particular platforms,” he says. “They will need people who can understand what each piece of code does, and how to fit those pieces together from a business perspective to give the business users what they need. These architecture skills will be prized above all others.”

Brian Farrelly, European strategic projects director at derivatives broker GFI Group, says his organisation recently implemented a Tibco SOA system to integrate its core operational software, and hopes to integrate other areas of the business such as e-commerce in the future.

“I think there will be an increasing demand for more architecture people within this environment because the product set we’ve chosen gives us most of the technical underpinning,” he says. “So we shouldn’t need a team of low-level programmers developing integration patterns, for example ­ that capability comes with the tools and the products that we’ve procured.”

Vocalink, the company responsible for handling most of the UK’s electronic payments, is another that has opted to take the SOA route. IT director Nick Masterson-Jones expresses similar sentiments to Farrelly and Craggs.

“We’ve moved off a monolithic mainframe Cobol infrastructure onto a modern Sun server/Oracle/BEA/Java SOA implementation. In terms of skills, one of the main areas of shortage is people who understand the business and how to meet its needs through the appropriate implementation of technology,” he says.

“We can find good Java coders, good Java designers, and good business analysts. But finding people with intersecting skills ­ who can look at a business problem and design a solution which fits with existing services ­ is quite a challenge.”

Carphone Warehouse is another organisation committed to SOA. But the key integration skills challenge for David Byrne, architecture director for group IS, is data migration, particularly the capability to extract data from various sources, transform it to fit business needs and then load it into target systems, a process known as ETL ­ extract, transform and load.

“Growing companies such as Carphone Warehouse, which have many separate but related businesses and occasionally acquire other companies, will have a strong demand for ETL and data migration skills,” he says. “Any company which has stated it is going to have a service-oriented architecture will require facilities to integrate all its services.”

The public sector faces similar issues when it comes to bringing together data and applications. Alasdair Mangham, head of information systems and development at Camden Council, says one of the organisation’s biggest challenges over the next few years will be data classification and cleansing. “We have a lot of data stored in a lot of back-end systems and it’s a big job,” he says.

“For a couple of years we’ve had a single land and property database to feed all our other systems using predominantly web services. That means we have consistent property data across all our main systems.

“However, we don’t currently have that for people ­ and that’s a big challenge given both the size of the borough’s population and the fact that we have a 23 per cent household turnover because of our central London location and the large number of one-bedroom properties.”

Mangham also cites integration challenges with customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI).

“We have a customer access strategy which is driving towards putting a lot of systems onto our CRM system, so we have a unified way of dealing with customers, and integrating those back-office systems is going to become a major challenge,” he says. “The other big challenge on our radar is BI, which is currently handled in silos across the organisation and needs to be integrated so that we can perform cross-analysis on data to drive improvements and efficiencies.”

One of the key problems in terms of skills is likely to be in developing interfaces to some of the council’s bigger, proprietary systems, such as for housing management and environmental services.

“What we don’t know is whether the suppliers will supply those kinds of skills at a rate we can afford or whether we’re going to have the skills in-house to get round it,” says Mangham. “In terms of pulling things into a BI system or writing a piece of middleware, I’m pretty sure we can get hold of those skills.”

For other integration projects, such as its Alfresco document management software and Applause web content management system, the council has used open source platforms and technologies. Mangham says Camden already has quite a bit of experience of open source.

“It gives you a greater level of flexibility in terms of how you manage and continue the development of a project,” he says. “We only have four dedicated developers here, which is not big considering the range of things we’re responsible for. As a consequence, we’ve tended to specialise in higher-end skills, such as design and project management, and offshored a lot of the development. With open source platforms, you have that option.”

As a London borough, Camden also has the problem of facing competition for skills with some of the high-paying private sector firms in the City. Mangham says the only solution is training people in the skills the council needs, such as integration architects.

“Our experience is generally if you employ people who are interested in developing skills and you provide them with the opportunities to put such skills into practice, you can probably hang on to them longer than you might expect,” he says. “Inevitably, once they reach a certain level we can’t compete with the salaries in the Square Mile, but we have a pretty good track record of hanging onto them for three to five years.”

One way to maximise your potential to anticipate and meet any future demand for integration skills is to do more work upfront, says Lustratus’s Craggs.

“A lot of customers require considerable help before they go down the integration route, in terms of understanding what it means, how they are going to benefit from it, and in understanding at a fundamental level how their business actually operates today,” he says.

Jim Mortleman
Incisive Media Ltd. ©
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