Systems integrations – a critical part of the management agenda
Integrations are essential to a company’s competitiveness and a key part of business development, argues Jussi Vuokko. Therefore, integration should also be on the top management’s agenda.
What do systems integration and business management have to do with each other? Aren’t integrations – that is, linking information systems together – important only to application developers and integration architects? Why should business management be interested in them?
Modern business is driven by data, and data moves with integrations
Today, it is hard to find a business where technology is not a key driver and enabler of business. Technology is used in manufacturing, construction, retail and services. They all rely on business technology.
Organisations’ technology solutions are based on a range of different systems, each of which meets a specific business need. No one system alone can solve all of these needs; they must be able to talk to each other. The reason is data.
Data is everything to today’s organisations, and data is everywhere. Data from different systems needs to be collected, combined and processed in some way to be useful. In addition, the agile integration of modern SaaS and cloud-based solutions that develop business and improve performance into the technology architecture is a key requirement for a modern organisation.
Integrations are a way to connect systems to each other. They enable the integration of modern solutions into your organisation’s technology architecture.
Integrations are needed to collect, combine and process data from different systems.
Your company’s competitiveness may rely on integrations
Integrations are essential to the success of your company. The ability to build integrations between systems in an agile and efficient manner enables the business to evolve as its needs change. Lack of this capability can be a major detriment to the competitiveness of the business. In fact, this happens all the time: according to MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report, only half of the technology projects businesses need can be delivered.
For example, consider a situation where integrations stop working between business-critical production-related systems. Or a situation where a lack of integration capability slows or prevents the integration of a solution critical to new business development into the technology architecture. Or a situation where the ability to understand customer needs is limited because customer data cannot be combined and used for marketing, for instance.
Building agile and efficient integrations between systems enables business development.
Integrations and interfaces are a way to create true digital transformation. The inability or slowness to harness modern technology and integrate it into business systems not only creates inefficiencies but gives more agile competitors a head start. Agile integrations and an agile integration architecture enable innovation and the rapid adoption of innovation, without which your organisation will wither.
This is why integrations should be a critical part of the management agenda. In my next blog articles, I will discuss how to manage and use integrations as part of your business.
This article is the first part of a series focusing on systems integrations. The goal of the series is to share information and insight on integrations and modern ways to use them as part of business and organisational development.
The author
Jussi Vuokko has been helping organisations of all sizes to manage services and automate business operations using modern technologies for over two decades. If you want to talk to Jussi about this topic, you can reach him by email at jussi.vuokko@sofigate.com, through Twitter @jussivuokko or LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jussivuokko.
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