My next product offering: EIEIO

It seems that every IT vendor is suddenly in the integration market these days. Application integration, data integration, enterprise integration, process integration, portal integratoin, business integration. I'm sure there are more. In my area of focus, the combined offerings of ETL (Extract Transform Load), EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), EII (Enterprise Information Integration) - did I miss one? - will subsequently, obviously, and undoubtedly be superceded by Enhanced Intergalactic Enterprise Integration Orchestration... or EIEIO in short. Does someone have a number of a patent attorney handy?

The whole integration idea is the right thing to do, of course. But I'm missing one fundamental piece. How do companies make people work together? People Integration (PI = 3.1415926535... I can already see the logo) hasn't really worked that well. Not on the business side anyway. Organizations continue to work as silos, employees are often competing with the person from the next department. And if they're not competing, they may still work counter-productively, because they don't know who else is working on the same thing. People integration doesn't work in politics either, or in religion, or in sports. So why do we IT guys try throwing software at a problem that's largely unrelated to IT? Maybe CXOs should employ more psychologists to get a handle on "real integration".