The Essential Information Integration Strategy
What is really behind the success of an e-business initiative? Is there a secret to succeeding in a business-to-business endeavor across a wide range of organizations? When will supply chains achieve the level of synchronization needed to make an exponential economic difference? How can your company make its mark in a virtual world? The driving force behind the hype surrounding many of these issues is information integration.
Integrating information, across the enterprise and within your industry sector, should be at the top of your corporate agenda. Piecemeal, poorly coordinated information integration efforts can send a company one step forward and two steps back. But what are we really trying to integrate and how can these efforts be coordinated across business units, data architectures, applications, web sites, suppliers, customers and industry consortiums? The answer to this question can be found within your information integration strategy – assuming you have one. An information strategy binds individual integration projects that, left uncoordinated, could introduce even more problems into your information infrastructure.
Your information integration strategy should, by definition, be as comprehensive as possible. Companies need to integrate information at the micro and macro level to ensure the consistency and integrity of that information as it pertains to your ability to function as an enterprise. A second requirement is recognizing the reality of the dependencies inherent in an integration effort. While vendors and analysts tout the wonders of business-to-business integration, the reality is that most companies cannot even get their e-business site to communicate with their procurement systems.
In other words, integration needs to happen at multiple levels, across multiple organizational units and all of this needs to be carefully coordinated. The challenge of defining your integration requirements and then launching multiple initiatives to meet these requirements is daunting. Consider the functions and entities involved.
At a business unit level, information provided to and by your systems must be consistent with information in other business units. Data architectures should eliminate or synchronize the redundancies typically found in legacy architectures. Disparate business units within an enterprise should provide customers with the same answer to the same question. Physical and electronic supply chains should share consistent, rationalized views of the same data across the spectrum of companies defined to that supply chain. This may sound like the Holy Grail of information integration, but nothing less is acceptable as the ultimate goal for corporations and industries as they leave the industrial era behind and move into a world that is driven by information.
You may be wondering if now is the right time to launch a comprehensive integration initiative. What if you cannot get the backing of senior management to coordinate and sustain a cross-functional integration effort? A business must feel the pain before a given problem gets management’s attention, sponsorship and funding. Given that management can recognize and quantify the symptoms, the integration challenge is now reaching the threshold of pain necessary for senior management to listen and support a plan of action.
If you are not quite sure of this, consider the jump in demand for web-based, customer facing systems needing to transfer customer-related information in a real time mode. Further consider that much of this information is still locked away inside of legacy systems where a customer may be defined as ten different things in ten different ways to a host of stovepipe systems. Now imagine that your web-based, order entry system must interface with these back-end legacy systems and be fully functional by year-end. Getting your arms around this challenge requires a cross-functional effort.
In some cases, however, a business unit may decide to rig a solution in the absence of cross-functional support. Take, for example, a project launched by a service supplier that places a web-based front-end on three legacy systems. This web-based system resulted from demands made by customers who wanted an integrated solution across business units at that service supplier. The integration tasks defined under this project included creating a common front-end, linking the new site to each of three back-systems and bypassing the three application specific security screens so the customer would think that this is now a single application.
The project team felt that they had achieved integration – but a second look tells us otherwise. Consider what was not done on this project and it speaks volumes about this organization’s particular integration strategy. The data structures used by these stand-alone systems remain separate and inconsistently defined. Enhancement requests from a customer who believes these systems to be integrated will eventually grow unmanageable. The security access scheme was rigged and could result in a customer gaining unauthorized access to internal systems. The applications themselves will begin receiving common enhancement requests that they may not be able to fulfill and the web site is only integrated at the most superficial level.
Complicating this scenario is the fact that the enterprise will continue to sponsor other projects like this one and then attempt to layer additional levels of integrated facades on top of the collective results. The situation companies are creating is one where executives perceive that systems are becoming increasing integrated when just the opposite is true. And these internal integration projects are the foundation for marketplace integration initiatives now underway among suppliers, distributors and industry partners.
One way to ensure that progress is being made towards an integrated enterprise and business-to-business model is to establish an integration "hub" structure. A hub structure is an organizational development term for a functional working group with a defined purpose, clear agenda, appropriate authority and representation from all relevant and affected parties. This integration hub could set strategy, recommend or sponsor various integration projects, and assess cross-functional and external dependencies for any proposed integration initiative.
The role of the integration hub would also include reviewing customer, supplier, web site, data architecture, application infrastructure, front-end, middleware, security and new technology integration from a holistic perspective. If an integration initiative was too narrowly defined or beyond the scope of a given business unit, the integration hub could launch an umbrella project to address integration issues at a more strategic level.
How we respond to integration demands will determine how effectively companies can compete in coming decades. As you contemplate this, consider that building, launching and sustaining an integration strategy must be woven into the fabric of the enterprise. This is not a one-time project where the IT people can pull one more miracle out of their collective hats. Integration of information, within and beyond the enterprise, must by its very nature involve multiple business units, executives, IT people, web developers and a growing host of external entities.
Without a comprehensive integration strategy that can bind disparate entities within and outside of the enterprise, companies and industries are like to struggle with individual initiatives that could ultimately be working at cross-purposes. Taking ownership of this effort will demonstrate leadership, but will again be a major challenge. Project leaders from all corners of a given enterprise should band together to demand the requisite levels of leadership, sponsorship, funding, commitment and participation from management and from any external entities with a stake in an integrated information enterprise.
Integration is not a buzzword and it is not one more item on an IT task list that can be worked in when time permits. Integration requires a shift in thinking and a change in how various functions within and outside of an organization interact. With so much at stake, all relevant and affected parties should step to the table now to build an integration strategy that can become the backbone for key initiatives going forward.