ProServeIT
By ProServeIT on May 09, 2017

What is Enterprise Integration and Why is it Important?

No matter what your business produces or provides, you need to know how to deliver what your customers want in a timely manner to meet and exceed their expectations.

To accomplish this goal, organizations strive to effectively manage their business processes while recognizing the need to share data more rapidly across teams within your organization. One of the best ways for your teams to achieve an easier and faster access to business-critical data is to adopt an Enterprise Integration approach.

Help your business processes fly with Effective Enterprise Integration

Enterprise integration seeks to bring business units closer together to increase capacity, improve performance, lower cost structure, and discover opportunities for improvement that don’t appear until you look across functions.

The world moves too quickly for enterprise integration to be ignored as a strategic imperative. Enterprise integration is the very means by which a business can achieve speed in everything from key business decisions, to reporting, to failsafe and accurate operations.

With rapid innovation in product and service offerings across all industries, the bar for exceptional service is constantly being raised. Customers are no longer concerned with just the quality or variety of products and services they have access to.

They also consider how companies create an experience that revolves around a product or service. Your business will be expected to excel in product and service innovation as a means to providing that experience. In order to provide the exceptional service and optimal experience expected by your customers, it is critical that relevant data from business units within your organization is accessed quickly and easily.

Enterprise Integration unites your business processes, applications and data together to create a comprehensive strategy, instead of each component working in isolation and requiring a manual process to link everything together.

Top Benefits of Enterprise Integration

Embracing Enterprise Integration helps remove bottlenecks in gaining access to and analyzing key data. Here are 3 major benefits of Enterprise Integration:

  • The elimination of siloed data and information by geography or business unit.
  • The ability to examine business views of information and to use external big data as comparisons for profit, costs, and losses.
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  • The ability to analyze your data in more meaningful ways to improve business decisions.

The experience of developing and maintaining services that are used across your organization puts IT in an optimal position to drive new insights and innovation that come from greater co-ordination of cross-functional activities.

 

Enterprise integration

Holistic Approach to Enterprise Integration

The holistic approach to Enterprise Integration provides a meaningful strategy and business case by allowing you to look at your organization through three lenses: Business Processes, Applications and Data.

  • Business Processes

The ultimate goal of an integration strategy is to provide a framework that enables the current business environment to function as seamlessly as possible, allowing for flexibility when processes need to evolve.

By including your processes in this integration, your team is able to maintain a manageable scope that allows you to reach appropriate depth and detail when describing the business activity. This will create a foundation that makes subsequent mapping progressively easier.

  • Applications

After outlining the critical business processes, your team can identify the applications that are directly supporting each step. Placing the applications alongside the process will highlight opportunities for simplifying activities through reuse or adding new components to enable new capabilities.

  • Data

Data and information that is ingested, transformed, and stored throughout the organization are the assets that enable business users to make decisions. Using appropriate tools and templates will round out your integration landscape by identifying the data elements produced and used at each step of the process to highlight where data integration can be improved as part of the overall strategy.

 

Let's chat about How Enterprise Integration can benefit your organization!

Enterprise Integration is an effective process in keeping your business ahead of your competition. However, it isn’t always obvious how you can apply Enterprise Integration to your organization. Our team of consultants have worked with many organizations and will be happy to help you realize the benefits of Enterprise Integration. Contact us today!

 

Published by ProServeIT May 9, 2017
ProServeIT