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HEUG Board Integrations Work Group

By Terence Houser posted 12-13-2016 05:09 AM

  

Hello Everyone, 

As the HEUG Board of Directors works​ with Oracle to understand their evolving cloud strategy, we have established a work group to gather and synthesize information about a very important factor in any implementation of cloud-based systems and infrastructures - integrations.

Gartner defines data integration as, “…the practices, architectural techniques and tools for achieving the consistent access and delivery of data across the spectrum of data subject areas and data structure types in the enterprise to meet the data consumption requirements of all applications and business processes.”  In the context of this work group and the content we intend to provide, we boil data integrations down to the methods, practices and architectures by which data is moved between different applications and systems.  We specifically do not consider reporting or the generation of reports a method of data integration. 

Integrations between disparate on-premise and cloud based systems may in fact be the most important component to consider when planning for and implementing cloud-based software solutions.  It's our belief that without careful planning and management of data integrations, institutions run the risk of not fully understanding the paths and destinations of their data as it  travels in the course of normal business.  In this day and age, knowing the state of our data is critically important to the stability and reputation of our institutions. 

The Integrations Work Group will be working diligently over the next several months to help member institutions understand the concept of integrations better, especially as they relate to cloud system implementations and considerations that need to be taken to manage them. 

We will be delivering a series of blog articles addressing the following subjects:

  1. Taking an inventory of your integrations and understanding the value that brings to your institution. 
  2. Executing business process reviews of your business processes to better understand how those may change with new integrations required with a cloud-based system implementation. 
  3. Having a clear understanding of integration architectures and the relative efficiency of them. 
  4. How to address the governance and security of data at your institution. 

The hope and expectation of this work group is that this information will evoke questions, comments and debate within our community.  We welcome your input and hope that you'll find the information quite useful as you consider what the cloud and integrations mean to you.

Regards,

Terence Houser
HEUG Vice President of Technology

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