Integration refers to the objective of the ICC to take a holistic perspective and optimize certain qualities such as cost efficiency, organizational agility and effectiveness, operational risk, customer (internal or external) experience, etc.
Center means that the service is managed or coordinated from a common (central) point independent from the functional areas that it supports.
Large organizations are usually sub-divided into functional areas such as marketing, sales, distribution, finance or human resources, to name just a few.
From an organizational perspective, an ICC is a group of people with special skills who are centrally coordinated, and offer services to accomplish a mission that requires separate functional areas to work together.
[citation needed] A major milestone was the publication in 2005 of the first book on the topic: Integration Competency Center: An Implementation Methodology[1] by John G. Schmidt and David Lyle.
The concept of integration as a competency in the IT domain has now survived for over 10 years and appears to be picking up momentum and broad-based acceptance.
The most advanced ICCs are using Lean Integration practices to optimize end-to-end processes and to drive continuous improvements.
To implement a best practices ICC, companies require a development environment that accommodates diverse teams and allows them to enhance and extend existing systems and processes.
The ICC itself may be almost invisible in that its functions are so ingrained in the day-to-day systems development life cycle and its operations are so tightly integrated with the infrastructure that it may require only a small central team to sustain itself.
This ICC model achieves both a highly efficient operation and provides an environment where independent development and innovation can flourish.
This goal is achieved by strict enforcement of a set of application integration standards through automated processes enabled by tools and systems.