System Integration
Integration and interoperability are buzzwords of our time. You need to assess what level of integration you are trying to achieve with your implementation. You need to bear in mind that being more 'joined-up' as an organisation often has as much to do with looking at structures and processes as it does with IT systems.
System integration is widely understood to mean the progressive assembling of system components into the whole system and this is something that the external functional and technical consultants will endeavour to achieve during the system implementation process. In fact, some consultancy firms refer to their involvement in an implementation project simply as providing 'system integration' services.
The new system is likely to comprise an integrated set of modules and functionality in its own right, especially if it is an enterprise-wide system, but this may not prove to be the panacea promised.
"Generations of users lamented the limitations of "stovepipe" systems - payroll systems that didn't share data, or even data definitions, with student systems and so forth. One of the promises of modern systems is integration - a common user interface, common query tools, and an integrated database. Integration has its costs, however; the software vendor has to integrate all the components successfully, and the customer often has to understand second and third order effects while making decisions about software implementation and process reengineering. Since "the customer" is typically a recently assembled team representing various campus constituencies and the next release of the software may be imminent, achieving such synoptic understanding - to say nothing of consensus on priorities - is a major challenge." Tony Collins, Computer Weekly, 2004 - "On the edge" - http://www.computerweekly.com/
Nevertheless, there is a broader context in which system integration has to be considered and that is the level of integration that the new system has with other existing and planned systems within the organisation. Notwithstanding the fact that the new system is likely to have a set of fully-integrated components, it is true that it can be implemented in a manner where it is entirely stand-alone and does not interact at all with other systems within the organisation?
Moving back to the stovepipe analogy, the difference between the two extremes can be represented effectively by thinking of the organisation being a house. Individual systems are the stovepipes in the left-hand diagram - they warm up their own rooms but don't have a wider impact, and some rooms may not have a stovepipe at all! The house on the right-hand side has progressed to an integrated central heating system, with the systems represented as radiators and the boiler as the central source of data. Although simplistic, this does visually get across the idea of increased efficiency and data flow that can be achieved by integrating systems.
There are many challenges involved if you are to fully integrate an existing application into the new system or vice versa. Clearly, it would be impossible to integrate two systems operating on different hardware, and it will be very difficult to integrate if the software, development languages, database management systems and database structures of the two systems are not the same or incompatible. The data to be processed and the timing of the business processes to be integrated also have to be compatible and this is something that should be considered in your Process Review.
There are undoubtedly additional risks associated with full system integration and extra testing and training would be required to check that each form of integration works correctly and to enable users to understand and operate the interaction between the two systems. These factors all add to the cost of the implementation.
Therefore, unless there is a compelling need to integrate systems, it is probably better not to consider integration in the first phase of the new system's implementation. Integration would perhaps be a better option in a second phase of the implementation at a later date when the initial operation of the system has settled down and more time can be allocated to integrating the systems.
