The Quest for Integration

Business and technology integration receives a lot of media nowadays. In a research study published by IBM in titled "Expanding the Innovation Horizon: The Global CEO Study 2006" a number of CEO's that participated in the study view business and technology integration as integral to innovation – or as one CEO put it, "as important as water is for sea traffic."

The relationship between business/technology integration and innovation is an important one. In the information age, productivity and competitiveness are the commanding forces for any  business in the global economy, but it differs from the industrial age in that productivity stems from innovation, and competitiveness from flexibility. So, if business/technology integration is recognised by CEOs as being essential for innovation to happen within their organisations, what lies at its essence?

The rise in complexity whilst doing business on a global scale is something that cannot be avoided. When considering the following picture, it becomes clear that from a network perspective (which is the organisational format in the information age), all relationships and engagements with entities such as customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders have an impact on the organisation.

Our relationships and engagements with all of the above-mentioned entities require sets of data and information, but in turn also generates a lot of data and information. One of our challenges with data and information is that it need to be integrated with all appropriate and applicable (relevant) other data and information.

Integrated information is therefore the aim of integration. Only when we take all available data and information into account, effective decision making becomes possible. To put this concept in other words, complexity can only be managed by means of integration. The IT industry is quickly catching up on the need for integrated information - they use the term "unified" to describe this need, and says that

Why are we not always successful with decision making in organisations? Look at the above-mentioned picture and it becomes clear that when we have fragmented management structures that works against integration (such as the infamous silo organisation) chances are that our decisions and their impact will also be isolated. In a recent ITWeb Brainstorm magazine article, IBM's recent global survey of CIO's shows that a large number of them distrust the information they have to use to make decisions.

As the nature or essence of customer services are integrated information, the typical symptoms of fragmentation are an increase in customer problems (internal and external customers), poor decisions, weak communications, slow reaction to problems, and a lot of conflict and internal company politics. The benefits of integration however are significant: more and consistent communication across the business, more customer centricity, better customer visibility and intelligence, less customer pains, etc.

CEOs recognise  the value of business/technology integration - in the same CEO study mentioned in the beginning of this post, CEOs of companies that have actively worked to achieve integration, cite the following business benefits (from most to least):

• Reduced costs
• Higher quality and customer satisfaction
• Increased revenue
• Increase in overall speed and flexibility
• Access to markets and customers
• Faster time to market
• Focus and specialisation
• Access to skills and products
• Shared or reduced risk and capital investment
• Move from fixed to variable costs

As HR Architects the quest for integrated information should be the ultimate aim or goal of our efforts. How "unified" are our HR organisation? How do we achieve integration across our HR organisation in all its facets and dimensions? Do we create enough views and simulations to see how data and information is flowing (or not) across our HR organisation? The quality of HR services are measured by the consistency and reliability of it - and because the nature of HR services is information, then we need to ensure that the data and information produced by the HR need to be consistently provided and should solve the HR-related problems of our customers!

A unified HR organisation has learned to, and has worked hard to integrate all those entities (systems and sub-systems) necessary for it to serve its customer groups with services of quality. The work is integration and the HR Architect must ensure that it happens!

Gerhard