--- In [email protected], "Steve Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If by involved you mean being brought in to clean up the mess after > some purist consultant architects and got involved then I've been > there on two notable occasions.
Interesting. I've never seen a "complete canonical" approach get far enough for success or failure. Though I guess that really means they failed since the challenges were recognized early enough to switch paths in time. > Thinking about interactions and the minimal reference set (i.e. the > very least you need to know to communicate) is the thing that I've > seen work over and over again. I think the debate ends up being one of "what constitutes minimal." Is it just the two apps we're trying to connect right now? Or should we look a little beyond the horizon? Being too focused on the minimal tends towards point-to-point communication and can limit adaptive range and business flexibility. But thinking too broadly or out into the future can complicate the solution beyond reasonableness--and trying to crystal ball what "might" be needed in the future often ends up wrong. Striking a balance between these extremes would seem to be worthwhile. > Its the default model for a given area, but not for the business > (which is what I was trying to get at). So yes if you use SAP in > Finance then in Finance it is SAPs model, but the SAP customer model > will not be used in Sales if they use Salesforce.com or Siebel. > Front office models tend to be very different to back-office models > in general. I see. You're looking at canonical models at different levels. When thinking about "canonical model" I'm usually thinking at the business- wide scope level, not a unit within the business. In my mind, canonical means app independent. In other words, there is but one canonical definition of a Customer within an enterprise and one or more app/domain specific definitions that can map to or are subsets of the canonical definition. That's where my head was when I asked about adopting an application's model as the canonical model. If the enterprise adopts the SAP customer definition (or a derivative), then Sales is supposed to interact with the rest of the enterprise using that model--mapping Salesforce/Siebel/whatever to that model. By default canonical model I'm referring to the idea that if no explicit model is defined, one of the application models often ends up being what the integrations gravitate toward. -Rob
