TechNO Expo

Information Technology Blog

Scott Lien
CEO, DBI Consulting, Brooklyn Park

Systems integration is concerned with causing disparate business applications to cooperate as a more effective whole. Enterprise applications—those robust applications that manage the processes and information critical to business operations—must engage in some degree of sharing.

To integrate enterprise applications, your first task is to understand why. Do you want better reporting? Are you trying to streamline business processes or eliminate redundant information? The answers to these questions will point to markedly different solution scenarios; simply implementing a technical integration platform won’t yield the business results you want. Understanding the full business context for integration (strategies, motivation, business rules, processes, and information exchange) is critical to successful integration, regardless of the types of technologies employed. The appropriate analysis ensures that the resulting technology implementations will be resilient and flexible business assets that have the potential to enhance strategic business value.

A typical client request is for help in data integration; people want better and faster access to data. But there isn’t a shared understanding of what the data means. No amount of data replication, service layers, or integration hubs will solve this problem. It can be a hard sell to convince a client that a lot of detailed business analysis needs to be done, but those that do take the time find themselves in a much better position to put technology to in a successful way.

A positive trend is increased focus on process integration versus a pure data-centric or technological approach to understanding integration. When data is integrated across organizational boundaries, it is very rare that the context of the data is identical in each of the business units. Until a few years ago, integration was looked at as strictly a data concern, which had serious negative consequences for many businesses. The trend to understand data integration in the context of process has been an improvement.