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What is integration and why is it important?

8 九月, 2015 - 14:52

Although this chapter is about B2B systems, throughout the chapter we will be discussing integration. But what is integration and why is it so important? Integration simply means causing or allowing things to work together cooperatively. Any business organization consists of a set of diverse people and systems, but the underlying premise of that organization is that all of its diverse elements will work smoothly together in order to meet its organizational goals in an efficient and effective manner.

If you consider a very small company, say a company consisting of only one person, then all of the functions of that company are integrated because that one person performs all of the needed functions of the company. Refer Thirkettle and Murch [1] for an insight into the challenges pertaining to managing information systems in a oneperson company. There a many examples of one person companies that are very successful because that one person is good at doing whatever it is that the company does. Unfortunately, few people can do everything needed by a company well. Even if they could, the quantity of output of a small company is necessarily limited. One of the tenets of the modern organization is that, as the organization grows in size, its members tend to specialize in specific functions. While this specialization allows each of those members to do their specific jobs better (as they are more focused on their individual tasks), it also decomposes what was originally a set of integrated tasks into a chain of separate, but related, functions. Thus, while functional specialization (i.e., decomposition) allows the various components of an organization to act more effectively, it increases the possibility of friction between those components. This friction would tend to reduce the efficiency of the organization. Making this chain of separate, but related, functions work cooperatively (or to reduce their friction) is the function of the executive management of the company. Finding ways to enable the people in an organization to cooperatively work together is a part of the study of Management. Finding ways to cause the information systems of an organization to cooperatively work together is a part of the study of Management Information Systems, or the topic of this book.

Unfortunately, the information systems of most organizations are not a set of programs that work together cooperatively; in other words, these systems are NOT integrated. Instead, in most organizations they are a collection of disparate systems which were individually developed over time to meet specific demands within the organization. This happened for many reasons. Certainly it is easier to develop an information system intended to provide for a limited number of demands rather than to provide for all of the needs of a company. Additionally, in the early days of IT the available technology was simply not robust enough to attempt what we now call integrated systems. Today, we call this collection of disparate systems, which are found in most companies, legacy systems. These systems are our legacy from those systems developers that went before us in the organization. Typically, these legacy systems do the jobs for which they were designed extremely well; after all, they have been used, tested, and improved over the years. Legacy systems were typically designed to support only one business function and are often called functional systems as they were not intended to be integrated with other systems within the organization. Any needed integration would be provided by people taking the output of one system and adding it as input to another system. For example, the accounting department usually has one or even a collection of legacy systems which support accounting operations. However, the same information would not necessarily automatically flow through this set of systems that support the accounting operations.

The problem with legacy systems is not with the jobs that they do, it is with their inability to cooperate with each other - they are not integrated. The lack of integrated systems requires that people work harder to provide the integration. They must manually enter one systemís output as an input to another. This is the friction that we discussed earlier and it creates inefficiencies within the overall set of business systems of the organization. It also means that the reports that these systems generate only provide a snapshot of the results for the specific function(s) that the system was designed to support. This makes it extremely difficult to have up-to-date information about the overall status of the organization. Having this up-to-date information, or in practical terms integrating the organization's information systems, has been the holy grail of executive managers and systems professionals for many years.