To Integrate or Not To Integrate, That is the Question

Businesses use lots of different software to take care of important tasks, such as accounting, file sharing and storage, Customer Relationship Management, or specialized operational apps. Most of the time, the team uses these different software packages independently because each is great at what it does or it is the only way to handle a specialized task.

More and more, software packages are offering varying degrees of features that enable integration. When we say “integration”, keep in mind it is a pretty broad term that can vary from the ability to export data from one package manually to sophisticated capabilities such as accessing the underlying database, getting notifications when something important has occurred, and even programmatically controlling the software like a user themselves might do. Even software without an API can be accessed automatically and made to share data.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we didn’t have a choice. Different software operated in disconnected silos and if you were lucky you could export a bit of data into Excel to manipulate, copy, and maybe re-import it into a different package. Now, particularly with cloud-based apps that do much of their work over the internet, we have a wide range of capabilities that make possible some pretty amazing ways of handling data.

Speaking of Handling Data, That’s What This is All About

Integration makes possible the sharing and movement of data through the organization by making different software “talk” to one another. It would be far simpler if all software spoke the same way, but that’s part of the challenge. When an organization can share key pieces of information between systems, it realizes some immediate benefits:

Benefits

• The amount of copying and keystroke errors decrease

• The quantity of data that can be shared often increases

• Data can be shared instantly across the organization, for example allowing invoicing to happen syncronously with project progress

• The data can be shared with everyone who needs to know it (even outside the business), so they are informed

Those alone are some pretty powerful benefits, but integration can offer more to a business:

• Reduce the need to switch between user interfaces of different software

• Add capabilities or ways to complete tasks that don’t exist within each available software

• Govern the data better, to improve data quality and keep it in the right hands

However, Integration Isn’t For Every Situation

Security

Integrations open doors into software that were previously closed. This changes the security “posture” of the company and needs to get handled carefully to help keep the bad people out.

Value

Sometimes the cost of making very different software packages communicate and share data between one another is so complicated, you have to wonder if the business value is there. It’s important to weigh the benefits. Just because “we can” doesn’t mean “we should”.

Reliability

Integrating software means making it dependent on the other software to perform the desired tasks. Is the integration set up to handle outages on one or more pieces of software? What if one software vendor makes an update that breaks the integration? Will the performance of the integration fit your business needs, or will it create a frustrating bottleneck for the team? These are the kinds of questions that are better to ask at the start than at the end.

Want to know more? We’re happy to share our expertise through a call/consultation!