Realizing the visions of the 'Retail Enterprise' by effective Integration Architecture

How should the 'Retail Enterprise' envision their 'System Integration' Architecture?

During the retail integration for a medium to big enterprise, the integration architects need to focus on the architecture that would not just help developing the web services to connect 2 systems, but rather construct the solution that would help grow their business and achieve the future roadmap for significant period of time ranging from 5 to 10 years. 

The enterprise integration architects need to focus the below aspects -

1.  Identify the standards in schema for the interfaces. 
2.  Identify the SLAs and QoS (Service Level Agreement & Quality of Service)
3.  Architecture to audit enough information about the errors.
4.  Designing the integration system to persist the payload that fails.
5.  Interfaces with a capability to identify the invalid payload vs failed payload.
6.  Recover from the error when the communication is restored.
7.  Ability to sustain for near and future Roadmap of the enterprise.
8.  Handle large and large-volume of messages.
9.  Capability to scale for more volume, velocity and size of data.
10.  Capability to interface more systems with less number of web-services.

In order to address the above features, there are various conceptual ways in which the interfaces can be implemented considering the visionary aspects of the business and related RoI (Return of Investment).  The architects have to spare some time to conduct the enterprise assessment and capability planning before they design an exhaustive interfaces.

The below are the critical aspects to decide on the 'Enterprise Integration':

• Enterprise's affordability in terms of Infrastructure, People and Process.
• Enterprise's business objectives and Roadmap.
• Future business expansion plans and timelines.

The above 3 points are important, simply because if they are not fulfilled, the money spent might not realize the vision and objectives aimed.

In the following blogs, I will be writing about steps to gradually achieve the effective integration that suits retailers and other domains. If you have any queries, please feel free to write to me @ sivakumar.th@gmail.com