Moron and Oxymoron

"An enterprise often contains a variety of applications that operate independently but must work together in a unified manner".This is the oxymoron under discussion.
"Applications that operate independently" but " must work together in a unified manner". Doesn't it sound like searching for shadows on a moonless night? Doesn't it seem like chasing mirages in an endless desert? Then what am I trying to prove here? Trying to prove nothing - that's another oxymoron.Huh! One is enough to spoil a life time. I can not accommodate a second.
The opening sentence is what EAI means. For the benefit of my blessed readers - blessed, if you do not know about EAI - I take the infinite pain of expanding the acronym EAI- ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION. That is in brief about my job. As a fresher, who knew nothing about IT industry I took the oath of integrating applications for a lifetime - possibly - you never know.

In short, according to me, here are the seven simple and defining principles of the oxymoron, EAI.
1. Build your enterprise anyway you like, in as many applications as you wish.
2. Your enterprise becomes huge and untenable. If it does not, make sure you make it.
3. Find innocent "somebody" outside your organization.
4. Repeat step 3 till you find "somebody" because you do not find intelligent goats easily.
5. Once you find that somebody, sit on his head and force him to wire the applications together.
6. Scream TTM(Time To Maket) and ROI( Return on Investment).
7. Repeat step 6 for ever, at regular intervals.

In the meantime major IT players, in the name of solving integration problems, form consortiums and arrive at industry standards. In the name of no-vendor-lock-in products, these companies release proprietary tools. The business houses to meet the ever rising bar of customer satisfaction ( that is our satisfaction, don't we ask why is this bank's website so slow or why is loan approval a week long manual process?)buy different off-the-shelf products from various vendors to reduce Time To Market. The disparate products from various, obviously and not surprisingly, do not agree with each other. And, the integration problems go to next level where the then( future dated ) big players, again, sit together to arrive at latest agreeable standards and go on to build different products on it. Thats how IT evolves.

Evolution IT has gone through in the past 40 years:
1. First, data and operations were put together. (procedure oriented languages - C)
2. Then data was separated from operations for the sake of data security . ( OOPS- JAVA, C++)
3. Next adapters were built for operations to access the data residing elsewhere. (EAI - whole lot of middlewares)
4. Then operations were combined to form services so that similar data operations could be done at a time( SOA).
5. Next the services(combination of operations) and data are colocated so that only way of accessing the data is through those services. ( Master Data Management - Websphere WCC/MDM )

Don't you see a full circle in this evolution, from operations and data together to services and data together? I do. I say all this irrespective of the fact there are huge monies involved in such projects, and I am very much an IT consultant who makes a living out of solving integration problems. Money wasn't the topic under discussion, at least it was not today.
Okay, do you find a moron(meaning: idiot,mental retard - otherwise no vulgarity intended) in the entire story? I promise there is more than one. I found out the Oxymoron you find out a Moron, at least one.