An imperative for the data-driven business: Integration and automation

For most businesses today, gaining a competitive advantage and optimising efficiency are critical against the backdrop of a difficult economic climate. According to Oracle, a top priority for chief operating officers in 2024 is to improve their application integration strategies. 

So how do you ensure that advantage? It lies in understanding automation and integration. 

While the former is largely understood, the latter may be less so. Integration, put simply, entails connecting different apps and services within one’s organisation, as well as with third parties. It determines how effectively you can connect your apps and services to suppliers, customers, and partners. 

Traditionally, large enterprises have had an upper hand, having the budget to afford expensive automation and integration tools that help them to streamline their operations. But in recent years, we have seen a levelling of the playing field as these tools become more accessible to medium sized businesses as well. 

Quantifying the risks 

While it isn’t immediately apparent when starting out in business why an integration and automation strategy is essential, as the business scales, this becomes increasingly evident.  

Without integration, businesses risk delayed turnaround of processing information, and high rates of data-related errors. This has a negative impact on customer satisfaction and can impede customer retention. 

As noted by Forbes, retaining customers can mean the difference between going out of business or thriving. 

That is not the only reason why integration is essential. As the business grows, a lack of integration can result in different departments losing sight on data sets. For example, the sales team starts to see one version of the data whereas the finance team will see another. A lack of data parity can create a silo effect within the business – where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing – leading to poor decision making at an organisational level.

Another risk at play without a well-crafted implementation strategy is that the business defaults to dealing with its data via hand-capture, which is slow and inaccurate; custom dev scripts, which fosters fragmentation; or citizen integration tools, which are often inflexible. Furthermore, these tools most often operate on a pay-as-you-go business model. The more the business grows and the more integration it requires, the more expensive it becomes to integrate.

With these factors in mind, mid-sized enterprises have previously found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. They need implementation to streamline their business processes and keep up with the influx of data that characterises this era, and at the same time have traditionally found it too expensive to be able to do so. 

Fortunately, the growth of the cloud, and cloud-based solutions like Flowgear, has afforded them another option. Now, medium sized businesses have access to a solution that had previously been reserved for the biggest enterprises with deep pockets, affordably. 

Strategies for integration

Even with implementation and automation solutions within reach, businesses still require a carefully thought-out implementation strategy.   

What many don’t realise is that like software, integration has a lifecycle.

While organisations need to move quickly with regards to integrating their data, they then need to slow down on the changes they make. The reason being that a great deal of change will have a far-reaching impact, particularly as the business becomes more complex and has more data, apps, and services it needs to integrate. 

Even so, businesses can’t really avoid making changes to their integration and automation entirely. Some triggers for change include business procedure change, onboard or offboarding of some products they are selling, vendor API or product changes, or if there has been an acquisition or merger and they need to consolidate their intellectual property. 

What can make dealing with integration a great deal easier is starting on a firm footing. Even before choosing an integration platform, organisations would be well served by building a catalogue that documents all the apps and services that are in use within the organisation. 

It can be immensely valuable to know, from the outset, the types of information to which each app is mapped. For example, being able to quantify which apps have customer data, whether the data set it refers to is updated daily, weekly or monthly, and which departments rely on those datasets all help greatly when it comes to prioritisation.  

When considering one’s integration and automation strategy, it is also important to come to terms with the fact that no organisation will be 100% error free. Rather, organisations should aim for their integration to have a 90 to 99% success rate. That remaining 10% to 1% respectively can still be dealt with by one’s personnel. 

Getting started

For those companies that are getting started with integration and automation, amongst the first decisions mid-sized organisations need to make is whether they will go a self-service or outsourcing route, or a middle ground between the two. 

As with so many IT solutions, there really isn’t a one size fit all product when it comes to integration and automation. Essential as they are to a business’s success, they are not simple. While they do require a fair amount of planning and thought, the long-term benefits for business sustainability are well worth the effort.

Picture Cred: CIO

The article was written by Daniel Chilcott, CEO at Flowgear