Digital Transformation has now clearly come to the forefront in organizational strategy. In the last few decades, a multitude of investments in Enterprise Applications from CRM, HCM, ERP and the rise of Marketing Automation tools have resulted in quite a diverse Enterprise landscape to manage.
As organizations move along the path to Digital Transformation, it is critical that the integration of these applications and processes take center stage.
Integration can be undertaken with the right technology investments or through process transformation, leveraging the organization’s existing investments. As changes occur in specific department’s business processes, IT or operationally (e.g. Mergers, Acquisitions, and Reorganizations); communication of those changes across business units and an understanding of how those changes affect the enterprise overall is important to ensure the integration isn’t effected.
Integration also enables organizations to leverage existing legacy investments within their Digital Movement. It plays the role of ‘Innovator’ by providing the platform for integration between each process area, and most importantly, brings accelerated visibility across the Enterprise. All applications or systems who are part of an organization’s Digital Strategy need to integrate their data across systems and also coordinate business processes.
When companies move toward a Digital Transformation, the complexity of their IT architecture increases. This may be an extended challenge until the full digital transformation is completed. Rather than re-architecting and re-engineering existing processes and architecture platforms, it’s always advisable to bring a scalable ‘Enterprise Integration’ platform in line with existing systems and processes.
For Example: Older ERP systems may not scale in the same way as expected for digital processes. In this case, building out connectors to pull information from these non-scalable systems is a good short term option.
Enterprise Integration can be deployed either as a departmental methodology or as an enterprise-wide strategy based on the specific needs of the organization. In both cases, identification of right processes and data is more critical than any other step. With the evolution of Integration Platforms, Cloud Platforms, Internet of Things (IoT), and Big Data solutions, identification of the right data to be utilized from each application is extremely important.
The integration principle revolves around the data and the enablement of data through each and every system participating in the new Digital Transformation process.
Enterprise Integration Platform enables the data flow (as depicted in the above diagram) to build a scalable Digital Platform.
Enterprise Integration is vital for the success of Digital Transformation. It liberates data across enterprise systems for better visibility and scalability, and minimizes redundancies. It’s important to also focus beyond the technology layer- documenting how current organizational processes and procedures will roadmap into the new digital schema.
It is critical for business units to not only operate well on their own- but as a holistic entity to gain the full benefit of a Digital transformation initiative.
Contact us if you have questions about developing a successful enterprise wide integration strategy.