Case Study - Integration Architecture Development for National Grid Plc (2002 – 2012)

In late 2002, working with external consultants and the business, I articulated a new vision for the systems supporting Nation Grid Transmission's asset and work management. This was based around a central asset repository, with a document management system, a field force solution, and a comprehensive data warehouse with Business Intelligence tools, all integrated by a shared EAI backbone.

In subsequent years I acted as National Grid’s lead architect as this vision was progressively implemented, providing guidance and supervision to internal and external service and solution providers, maintaining a “hands on” approach.

I was actively involved in the design of the integration architecture. In order to provide maximum flexibility and isolate different systems from the complexities of one another we developed a scheme based around a canonical “common message model”, which has proven very capable particularly during a number of subsequent major system replacements. When the core asset management system was upgraded and restructured in 2007-9 we avoided any downstream impact on the field force, GIS, document management or data warehouse systems. Subsequently a number of other systems have been integrated, but it has frequently been possible to re-use existing flows, minimising the costs of new integration development.

I personally invented the solutions to a number of key problems, including a mechanism to track asset changes by comparing messages passing through the integration layer, and a rule-based “transformation engine” which transforms between the common message model and a very complex proprietary model doing away with a very large number of complex hand-coded transformations.

The benefits of the canonical integration architecture formed the subject of a paper I presented at the 2011 Enterprise Architecture Conference in London.