You have invested heavily in IT; you have a financial system, a HR system, a website, a customer database or CRM system, and maybe a core operational system which drives your core business. But you are frustrated; by the complexity of managing disparate systems, by the lack of integration between systems, and by the manual effort required to keep the systems in step - effort which could be redirected at more value enhancing activity. Unless you have invested very heavily in one fully integrated system that fulfils all of your IT needs, some of this is likely to be familiar.
Another article about the benefits of systems integration? Not quite, it is aiming a little higher than that; true business integration. Imagine for a moment that there is some "magic glue" that can receive a message from one of your systems, translate it into something meaningful to another of your systems, and transmits that message to the destination system - repeatedly and without fail. This is great as far as it goes, but business processes require people making decisions as well as systems. So imagine that additionally you can configure the "magic glue" not only to integrate systems together, but also to integrate people together with systems and people together with people. This can also include the systems and people belonging to your suppliers and clients. In this way all of the components required to conduct your key business processes can be made to work seamlessly together.
So, for example, if a customer makes a large order via your website and a credit authorisation is required before goods are dispatched and invoiced, the "magic glue" would detect the order on the website, send an authorisation request by e-mail or SMS to the appropriate person and, once authorised, extract the order details from the website and posts it in the correct format to the financial system for picking, dispatch and invoicing.
There are, of course, many more complicated business processes that incorporate both people and systems that the "magic glue" could handle, including both core operations and non-core processes such as HR and finance.
You’ve probably guessed that the "magic glue" is not so magic or elusive. This kind of translation and orchestration software is becoming well established, and many of our clients are taking the fundamental decision to use it as the central hub of their systems architecture. If you’d like to find out more about this, and particularly Microsoft BizTalk, then please feel free to get in touch.
William Morris
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