Integrationconnectivity

Integration is not always about cost effectiveness, but what drives the need for better performance.

The purpose of integration is to enforce collaboration and unification in order to create business synergy, improve the value from existing organizational systems and the need for better business intelligence, applications optimization, performance acceleration, etc. 

Integrating the right systems for the right business reasons can be extremely valuable. However, integration can be very difficult, costly and hard to justify the ROI. It might not be cost effective in the short term but in the long term, it will be.

Integration vs. alignment: It takes time, vision, and the willingness drive to change, and take alignment to ensure all organization action is directed to achieving common strategic goals and objectives. Strategic alignment is important in working to a common goal, integration enables the organization to use resources scientifically and increase multifaceted business value. By integrating, you are creating a case where you force an organizational alignment to the integration for creating business synergy.

Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking. From alignment to integration, you integrate when a justification can be made for doing so. It needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, and governance. Those organizations that have a more mature strategic alignment -integration, outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic.

Integration vs. standardization: The goal of standardization is often to improve business efficiency and increase reusability. The purpose of integration is to enhance unification and collaboration. Standardization and integration are strategies/responses to particular demands, which will give rise to the outcomes being sought and thereby the benefits. Standardization should be done at the solution level. To try and standardize just for the sake of standardizing, is a waste of resources and time.

There should be some justification for standardization or integration. Due to the silo mentality and lack of cross-functional communication and collaboration, if standardization requires compromising on the functional or performance needs of one or more groups involved, then obviously it is not a good idea. The traditional overly rigid hierarchical setting makes the standardization process and practice challenging. There are a variety of integration such as technical integration, operations integration, governance integration, policy integration or customer-centric integration. Integration also needs to be dealt with the big picture such as architecture to ensure the goal of integration is aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. High standardization and high integration lead to unification and improve organizational agility and speed.

Integration & optimization: Effective management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. In reality, many companies that get stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity operate as the sum of pieces, rather than an integral whole, Integration is about unification; optimization is about leveraging information technologies to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue, to ensure the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

It is challenging to take the converging journey of digitalization, modernization, and innovation. It is a golden opportunity for digital leaders to lead the way by consolidating, integrating and optimizing the business to accelerate performance. It is through this comprehensive understanding that effective business management would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities. There are both hard and soft success factors to unlock performance. It takes a very concerted and organized effort and a strong desire to build a high mature organization.

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. Integration is not always about cost effectiveness, what drives the need for better performance. Those organizations that have better integration maturity outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to increasing pace of changes, develop a cohesive set of business capabilities, deliver, innovate and ultimately excel in returns.

Posted in: Business Intelligence,Business Process Management,Systems Wisdom