As one system is not enough for most companies, there will be a need to integrate systems.
For many years, the traditional way of integrating systems has been to create a dedicated connection between two systems that needed to exchange data. For most companies that have more than a few systems, this has led to an untenable situation. They have experienced difficulties in making an overall assessment of their systems, and hence found it difficult and expensive to maintain them. This situation is often compared to spaghetti —most people know how difficult it is to separate cooked cold spaghetti. In a situation like this where changes gradually slow down — the company is seriously constrained.
To recover from this situation, it is important to define an integration strategy that describes how systems are to be integrated in the future and to provide a migration path for existing system integration — i.e. how does the company escape from the existing deadlock.
