Even if a company unifies the technology for integration, they run into problems with differences in business process and conceptual dissonance with the data. One division of the company may think a customer is someone with whom it has a current agreement; another division also counts those that had a contract but don’t any longer; another counts product sales but not service sales. That may sound easy to sort out, but when you have hundreds of records in which every field can have a subtly different meaning, the sheer size of the problem becomes a challenge—even if the only person who knows what the field really means is still with the company. (And, of course, all of this changes without warning.) As a result, data has to be constantly read, munged, and written in all sorts of different syntactic and semantic formats. Then there’s the matter of what comes under the term “business logic.” I find this a curious term because there are few things that are less logical than business logic...
Some tribes of the programmer clan.