Integration

There are different complexities at a different time or dimension and there are multilateral integrations to achieve business coherence.

A new paradigm arises out of advanced mindsets, updated knowledge, and structural approaches. It is transformational to “step outside” of the business system for having different perspectives to gain an in-depth understanding of the business dynamics, break down silos, lead business transformation in a structural way. 

The purpose of integration is to enforce collaboration and unification in order to create business synergy and catalyze organizational growth continually.

Opening up cross-disciplined dialogs to ensure the goal of integration is aligned with the strategic goals of the organization: In order to adapt to rapid change, dynamic planning, integration and implementation is the continual attention to emerging opportunities and risks in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. In fact, integration is an important practice in a variety of management disciplines such as change management, information technology management, process management, or talent management, etc. Thus, integration has to be done with a “big picture.” You integrate when a justification can be made for doing so, creating a case where you force an organizational alignment to maximize the value from existing systems and the need for better business performance and responsiveness.

Technically, there are information/data integration, application integration, process, GRC integration, etc. Integration is the key to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility. Besides potential benefits, there are hassles behind integration. By integrating, change management becomes a more complex problem because multiple business lines are impacted. Those costs should be offset by benefits before attempting integration. The goal of a variety of integration is to ensure information consistency, ROI, security, and interoperability for running a highly responsive and high-performance business.

Understand the business drivers for the integration to align the technology investment to the business value: Information is the invaluable asset that the company refines into invaluable business insight; technology is often the disruptive force to catalyze innovation. Organizations are at a different stage of the business growth cycle, they have different strategies for IT investment, and integrate IT investment to generate business value. Technology should be an enabler, not an end in and of itself. The more integration between business and IT, the more level of agility for both will be achieved.

Invest IT aggressively but with a cautious attitude. make investment decisions balancing attractiveness and achievability, and manage the required business changes. IT management needs to be accountable to "organize IT financial, technical, and human resources around business value." To invest in technology and integrate IT-enabled changes, ensure non-IT business leaders understand people, process, organizational and cultural changes that will be required, and for which they must be accountable, if they are to create and sustain value from "IT investments."

An integration strategy & framework is key for an effective application portfolio: The first thing to understand is that "integration" is not always cost-effective, especially with highly disparate systems. It often takes cross functional collaboration and interdisciplinary expertise to get integration right. The successful integration will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in building solid and differentiated business competency. Thus, a holistic integration framework with a well-designed dashboard and scorecard enables the business to build an effective application portfolio with a variety of abilities, as well as the ability to measure integral performance effectively.

Sometimes, having alignment at the top of global management concerns is indicative of the persistent, pervasive conundrum. Companies have limited resources/talent, an integration framework provides a view of the entire organization and the interaction between the entire business, integrates their business capacity in order to balance business stability and growth, orchestrates organizational interrelationship by bridging gaps, enforcing communication, fostering collaboration, sharing information, building trust, and ultimately leading to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement. The successful integration will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in building solid and differentiated business competency. It helps to orchestrate organizational interrelationship by bridging gaps, enforcing communication, fostering collaboration, sharing information, building trust, and ultimately leading to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement.

The impact of today’s technologies, their integration with other new technologies, seems to be more profound, especially given the concurrent ecosystem changes going on. There are different complexities at a different time or dimension and there are multilateral integrations to achieve business coherence. Business management should pay specific attention to integration, quality, standards, regulations, etc, to improve reusability, reduce frictions, eliminate waste, optimize processes and build a cohesive set of capabilities for achieving high performance results.

Posted in: Information/Data Management,IT Innovation,IT Performance Management,IT Strategy/Roadmap,IT Transformation