CIOs have been talking about enterprise application integration for as long as they've been talking about business-IT alignment or proving the value of the IT function. That is to say, for decades. And, according to a new Forrester Research report, it seems that CIOs have had about as much success solving the former as they have the latter two tasks. In other words: Since there's still no Integration Pixie Dust on the market, there's much more work to be done.

The new Forrester report, It's Time to Tame the ERP Integration Beast, by analysts Ken Vollmer, George Lawrie and Mike Gilpin, offers a grim picture of both the technical hurdles and business obstacles CIOs encounter when trying to "tame the beast." The analysts describe IT's burden:

"Enterprise apps are born free and self-contained, yet everywhere they are in chains. They are in chains that bind them to the complementary apps in an enterprise, they are harnessed to apps and processes shared by members of a value-chain community, and they are connected to outsourced processes or cloud services such as Salesforce.com. IT designs these chains to bring greater value to the enterprise from its applications and in many cases has spent the past decade working to integrate these applications, but integration issues often limit the actual value apps can deliver."

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