The 47-Record Bug Nobody Documented: What Enterprise Integration Actually Teaches You
Three months into a banking integration project, we were confident. The message transformation layer between the core banking system and the new customer onboarding platform was clean. Mappings were solid. Performance was acceptable. The architecture review had gone well.
Then we talked to the loan officers.
It turned out the "same" customer record looked completely different depending on which department had entered it. The mortgage team stored addresses differently from the credit card team. The compliance department had fields that the business units didn't know existed. Our elegant integration was mapping garbage into garbage, and we had spent three months building it.
That project reset something in how I think about integration. Not as a plumbing problem. As a socio-technical excavation.
Twenty years later, the teams that fail at enterprise integration still make the same mistake we almost made: they assume the hardest part is the technology.
It isn't.
The...
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