Build Effective Enterprise Integration on the Back of Business Process
From the backend to the frontlines – let enterprise integration help your business processes fly.
- Organizations undergoing growth, either organically or through M&A, tend to develop integration capabilities in a piecemeal and short-sighted fashion to preserve their view of agility.
- Integration strategies that are focused solely on technological solutions are likely to complicate rather than simplify, as not enough consideration is given to how other systems and processes will be impacted.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Define a path for your EI strategy. Establish the more pressing goal of enterprise integration: improving operational integrity or adding business intelligence/predictive analytics capability.
- Combine multiple views of integration for a comprehensive EI strategy. Assess business process, applications, and data in tandem to understand where enterprise integration will fit in your organization.
- Don’t start by boiling the ocean and get bogged down in mapping out the entire organization. For the purposes of the strategy, narrow your focus to a set of related high-value processes to identify ways to improve integration.
Impact and Result
- Begin your enterprise strategy formation by identifying if your organization places emphasis on enabling operational excellence or predictive modeling/analytics.
- Enterprise integration needs to bring together business process, applications, and data, in that order. Kick-start the process of identifying opportunities for improvement by creating business process maps that incorporate how applications and data are coordinated to support business activities.
- Revisit the corporate drivers after integration mapping activities to identify the primary use cases for improvement.
- Prepare for the next steps of carrying out the strategy by reviewing a variety of solution options.
- Develop a compelling business case by consolidating the outputs of your mapping activities, establishing metrics for a specific process (or set of processes), and quantifying the benefits.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 8 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Position enterprise integration within your organization
- Call 1: Discuss past experiences with implementing enterprise integration and the value of creating a strategy
- Call 2: Identify which stakeholders should be involved and discuss the recommended focuses for enterprise integration
Guided Implementation 2: Explore the lenses of enterprise integration
- Call 1: Discuss Info-Tech’s approach to integration mapping
- Call 2: Discuss the current state of application integration and things to consider when improving it
- Call 3: Discuss the importance of identifying the data and information assets that are enabling business activities
Guided Implementation 3: Develop the enterprise integration strategy
- Call 1: Review your integration summary and discuss the observations, challenges, and opportunities for improvement
- Call 2: Discuss solution options, depending on which aspect of integration you want to improve
- Call 3: Consolidate all the activity outputs into a cohesive business case for the strategy
Contributors
- Albert Hui, Principal, Data Economist
- Hariharan Ganesarethinam, Director, Enterprise Architecture and Integration
- Joseph Markus, Canada Chief Solution Architect, Avanade Canada Inc.
- Shahrokh Mohseni, Head of Enterprise Architecture and Integration, Mobile Broadband Network Limited
Build a Data Integration Strategy
Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps