Integrating with business systems – where to start

Esri’s goal with the WebGIS (see this blog on “What is Web GIS”)concept is to break down silos and make spatial data and processing services accessible to anyone that wishes to use them. This concept falls right into the hands of many organisations, who wish to integrate their systems, allowing processes and decision making to be based on authoritative and accurate data. Should an organisation not reap as much benefit out of a legacy system as possible, the risk of losing the backing of management could inevitably lead to budget cuts or even closure of departments. It is therefore of integral importance that any system provides an organisation with a business case and functionality that is critical to the day-to-day running of the organisation. For this purpose, one of the core functionalities that all systems must provide their clients is the capability of integrating with other systems. The value of accessing data and services from other systems, through a single platform, is immense. The intention being that processes are streamlined; product quality and performance are improved and ultimately, decision making is based on a holistic view off all relevant authoritative dataset from the key stakeholders in your organisation.

Integration?

But what does it mean to integrate and how does one go about integrating one system with another? Quite simply put, integration means, accessing information and\or services of one (or many) system(s), on a different platform. We want to do this for 3 main reasons:

1. Geocentric Application: As the “geocentric” term alludes to, this is a GIS orientated pattern, where the organisation’s business data is accessed via the geospatial platform, like the municipal cadastre, that is updated daily by diligent GIS staff at your local municipal offices. The content consists predominantly of spatial data and geoprocessing tools to enrich the business data and is utilised by staff that have a background in GIS.
2. Geo-Enable Application: This pattern leans heavily towards the business’ system hosting the data, while the GIS platform’s role is to provide functionality and capabilities to the business system, that would not otherwise be offered. Be it address geocoding of data, map visualisation window for location verification during a process or field mobility capabilities, the geo-enablement pattern enriches the business system with useful capabilities that fall outside of the its core strengths.
3. Composite Applications: Should an organisation have multiple systems and none of them are considered as the central hosting framework, then the composite application is considered as the business pattern to pursue. In this case, web services and capabilities from the various systems are integrated to provide superior functionality. 
   

   Integration patterns for business systems

   What about web services?

   Having got the complicated concepts out of the way, we can go ahead and look at how to go about integrating with the ArcGIS platform. First and foremost, you don’t have to be a developer to integrate your ArcGIS Enterprise with another system. Esri has made the integration process very easy by allowing users to add web service URL as items, to their ArcGIS . As in “//service1.arcgis.com/<item’s id>/arcgis/rest/services/<feature name>/FeatureServer”. Be it ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise or a wide variety of ArcGIS apps, adding web services is a simple procedure.

Should your organisation wish to integrate their system with certain features of your GIS platform, you can simply provide them with the desired feature service’s URL to the system’s administrator. They will then gain access to the data or GIS capabilities you have provided them with, for their own use. Complexity comes in the form of the data’s format. In some cases, it is necessary to make alterations to the format of the incoming service, in order for a system to consume the incoming service correctly. In cases like this, some additional configuration will be required. In this regard, Esri has you covered, with the Data Interoperability for ArcGIS extension.

It’s interoperable, silly!

This extension allows users to build ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools, that can convert almost any datatype into a format that the destination system can consume. The interoperability extension can be a once-off ETL task that is run from the ArcGIS desktop software, or an automated ETL task (check out this blog, which covers ETL automation) can be set to run, which will translate the incoming service stream into a compatible format, in real-time. Even though integration is a daunting process, that can easily become complex and messy process, Esri provides simple tools and literature to aid any GIS professional to start the process and do the job right the first time. So, if have not integrated your GIS implementation with other business systems, then now is the time to get going!  

P.S.: Here are some helpful resources to start off with.

–              Architecting the ArcGIS Platform: Best Practices

–              wiki.gis.com: Data integration

–              All you need to know for ArcGIS web services

–             An informative blog post on the Data Interoperability for ArcGIS extension