You’ve spent time and money carefully planning, building and implementing the key systems and technologies necessary to run your institution. So, how do you integrate these technologies efficiently and cost-effectively to meet your business needs? How do you design your IT system to easily respond to today’s challenging business and IT drivers, such as:
- Escalating requirements for integration with widely diverse campus user or vendor systems
- Extensive application integration environments with brittle point-to-point interfaces
- Redundant, inconsistent data with no single version of the truth
- Demanding regulatory and compliance requirements
CIBER's Enterprise Integration Practice designs IT architectures and integrates business data and applications to deliver fully functional solutions tailored to your unique needs. We blend our best-of-breed tools, standardized processes, best practices repository, and skilled resources in higher education; enterprise architecture; enterprise application integration; business intelligence and data warehousing; and enterprise information management to help our clients leverage information for optimal value.
An architecture or integration solution that doesn’t incorporate your key data, applications and business processes isn’t really a solution.
“Architecture” means a fundamental underlying design of buildings, communities…and information technology (IT) systems. Over the years, technology has changed immensely, leaving many institutions with a mix of disparate IT systems that don’t work together or that duplicate effort and data. CIBER can help you make the most of your IT investments by architecting a solution that enables these systems to work together to streamline your processes, maximize value, and enable fast, flexible change in response to the changing higher education landscape.
“Integration” means combining technology architectures (such as organizational, business, applications, and data) in the best way for your institution. No one strategy is right for everyone, so we work with you to understand your infrastructure and processes to create a comprehensive solution that’s right for you. We focus on understanding your institutional mission and goals to ensure your enterprise integration initiative drives toward these goals, providing added value and increased flexibility each time new infrastructure is deployed.
Comprehensive Services
CIBER has a wide range of services to meet your current and future enterprise integration needs, such as:
- Enterprise Architecture, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture (EDA), and advanced SOA
- Application Integration
- Legacy Migration and Modernization
- Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
- Enterprise Information Architecture, including enterprise architectures, master data management, data governance, and data integration methods and tools
Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is at the heart of any good enterprise strategy, providing the supporting system to further your institution’s mission and strategy. To fully use current and future technology, your enterprise architecture must be stable, consistent, accessible, and aligned to the business. CIBER offers numerous services, from development to refinement, to attain your architectural goals.
Our team of experts designs best practices-based, service-oriented, component-based architectures that can be reused across multiple business processes and applications. This allows for flexibility and adaptability to market dynamics and for more efficient replacement and integration of application components.
We work with you to ensure your enterprise architecture and developed applications satisfy business needs. We can provide technology selection and standardization, process management, project management, and software design and implementation, and can offer insight on IT governance, enterprise IT architecture, and IT processes and standards.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) SOA is an architecture, not a technology—a method of conceptualizing, designing, and implementing business software applications and infrastructure. It incorporates centralized and disciplined enforcement of industry standards, assembly of reusable autonomous business functions (also called “services”), and loosely coupled connections between services.
This allows your institution to extend the functionality and life of existing IT assets, reduce architectural complexity, decrease duplication of services and data, and increase flexibility and agility in responding to market changes. SOA is a way of molding IT technology around the needs of your institution, instead of molding your practices around IT.
SOA also places important demands on the enterprise to adjust organizationally, behaviorally, and culturally. CIBER has developed a comprehensive methodology and toolset based on industry best practices to ensure that SOA is effectively developed and deployed in close coordination with the imperatives that drive your entire institution. Using this methodology, we offer full lifecycle services, from conducting discovery sessions and assessments to ascertain the current state of your IT system, to building “roadmaps” that define specific tasks for moving toward a service-oriented architecture to implementation and support.
Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) EDA is an architectural style for using software modules/services where the modules are designed to post or receive event notifications. EDA is typically used in applications such as business process monitoring where real-time or near real-time performance is required. Just as services are at the core of SOA, an event is the key artifact in the design of EDA-style applications. Again, just like services in SOA, events must have a business scope to be employed across applications and enterprises.
EDA, like SOA, combines business services into transactions, flows and logical units of work but differs significantly from SOA in the messaging protocol, typically publish-and-subscribe, used in the EDA notification process. EDA also normally uses an intermediary notification broker that decouples the notifier and receiver, whereas SOA usually involves direct request-response messaging between the service consumer and service provider.
Advanced SOA Advanced SOA (or “SOA 2.0”) links the interaction-based SOA and the notification-based EDA patterns within a single architecture. When implemented, both event processing and SOA messaging will share metadata facilities, middleware messaging resources (such as ESBs), security, management, and other common facilities.
CIBER is uniquely positioned to aid customers in achieving a seamless implementation of these technologies where business requirements dictate that an advanced SOA solution is desirable. As institutions gain experience in their use and deployment of SOA and EDA solutions, advanced SOA will become the predominant architecture for enabling the agile enterprise.
Enterprise Application Integration
To ensure IT capability is in tune with business needs, enterprises must synchronize IT architecture with the business. This means that enterprise application integration (EAI) and middleware—the system software or runtime infrastructure used to provide intra- and inter-application communication—must be used.
CIBER has the resources and expertise to help you use EAI to best advantage. Whether it’s integrating student or staff-facing web environments with legacy systems through use of middleware (e.g. MQSeries, CORBA and MSMQ), N-tier component-based architecture and communication technologies, CIBER’s approach integrates applications and information previously isolated in individual silos, which enables these systems to efficiently share information with one another, as well as with other systems.
Legacy Migration and Modernization
CIBER’s approach to legacy migration and modernization is tightly integrated with our approach to enterprise architecture and enterprise application integration. We emphasize the need to leverage the significant investments currently locked in legacy systems. Our approach may include exposure of legacy business processes and applications into new architectural environments through application wrapping and Web Services.
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
The Enterprise Integration Practice within CIBER is dedicated to supplying CIBER’s customers with world-class, industry leading talent in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence. Our people include authors, presenters, and working committee members, most of whom hold certifications in project management or business intelligence.
For each project, we provide resources and intellectual capital to ensure successful delivery of BI/DW solutions aligned with your institutional strategy and direction. Our methodology is designed to provide our clients with good value within focused system delivery while incrementally developing a stable business intelligence solution infrastructure. Our approach is business-focused, best-practices-driven and architected for your unique institution. An early leader in data management, CIBER focuses on delivering the right information to the right users at the right time.
To help you translate data into the knowledge you need for critical business decisions, CIBER offers proactive mentoring and knowledge transfer in conjunction with a complete end-to-end Business Intelligence (BI) Scalable Data Warehousing (DW) solution including the following offerings:
- Architectural Assessment:
- BI/DW Scope Definition
- BI/DW Requirements Definition
- BI/DW Design and Development
- Related Support and Guidance
Enterprise Information Management
At a time when business intelligence is critical to winning in the marketplace, many businesses are faced with an explosion of data housed in different formats, locations, software and hardware. To deliver reliable information providing the most value to the right users at the right time, a business must understand and manage its data as an asset across the enterprise. Enterprise Information Management encompasses the frameworks, architectures, disciplines, and tools that make this possible.
Over the years, CIBER has continually refined and expanded its capabilities in helping customers put effective Enterprise Information Management initiatives into practice as they continue to respond to the ongoing need for information. Toward that end, CIBER provides a wide range of services including project management, mentoring, and JAD facilitation, combined with templates, guidelines, and standards developed in keeping with industry best practices. Leveraging these assets, CIBER partners with customers to develop and implement:
- Enterprise Architectures
- Metadata Management
- Data Governance Programs
- Data Integration Tools and Methods
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CIBER has completed the redesign and redevelopment of the first of three hospital patient flow and capacity management applications for Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies.
Using their body of datawarehousing best practices as an architectural framework, CIBER helped the 
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