Data-centric approaches to EPM integration fail to deliver timely and reliable information to the disparate systems that are integrated. This is because the practice of project management, and its associated information, is inherently a process-centric exercise. Where many types of information can be integrated in a data-centric approach without ill effects, using this approach with EPM data actually causes more serious issues than existed without integration at all.

There are many reasons for integrating systems with each other. Data consistency and master data management are oft cited business reasons for approaching a data integration project. There is also the need of supporting business processes and having a way to enforce business rules across disparate applications. The problem arises however that many integration models and technologies really only provide a data centric integration capability and the transactional systems being integrated don’t have any way of supporting or enforcing the business logic of the other side of the integration. This last part leads to its own issues of data integrity management.

Further compounding the issue is that project data itself has a life cycle over the span of a project where data ownership can change and even have periods of inaccuracy during status updates. Project management systems, even though transactional in nature, don’t have the transaction boundary sophistication of many ERP applications on the market today. When a project manager updates a single activity as part of an overall project status update, that data is live long before the project manager gets done with status updates or project rescheduling. In stark contrast to this, most ERP systems will lock or provide last known values for entire blocks of budget or cost structures during an update process thus protecting the in flux information from inappropriate usage.

The need therefore clearly exists to use a process-centric model for achieving integration of project management information. Only when the flow of information in an integration solution is controlled by business process and defined states of information within the project can one rely on the correctness and completeness of the integrated information.

In this manner, the project management system can be integrated with multiple systems safely and with clear definitions of data ownership defined based on the overall state of a project. Given that there are usually many projects in different phases such as planning, budgeting, execution, etc- the ability to control each project’s information discreetly is paramount to data hygiene and accurate reporting capabilities.

Once the decision is made that supporting the business processes for project management across systems is one of the key reasons for integrating, using a process-centric model not only makes sense, but drives the ability to achieve a dynamic enterprise project environment. In this dynamic EPM environment, information flows and is available as a result of performing the project, from conception to completion. Whether the integration spans two systems or ten, the ownership of the information is defined by the project life cycle state and the flow is orchestrated by the act of working the process.

The benefits are multi-fold. Not only are data consistency and master data managed within this approach, but the imposing of process on the integration model allows business rules to be expressed independently of the the capability of the systems being integrated. Such rules may be defined to control the treatment of the information or to control the processing itself. This truly creates a Dynamic EPM environment where information is acted upon based on its current status, ownership and conformance with internal standards.