Build Effective Enterprise Integration on the Back of Business Process
From the backend to the frontlines – let enterprise integration help your business processes fly.
- Organizations undergoing growth, either organically or through M&A, tend to develop integration capabilities in a piecemeal and short-sighted fashion to preserve their view of agility.
- Integration strategies that are focused solely on technological solutions are likely to complicate rather than simplify, as not enough consideration is given to how other systems and processes will be impacted.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Define a path for your EI strategy. Establish the more pressing goal of enterprise integration: improving operational integrity or adding business intelligence/predictive analytics capability.
- Combine multiple views of integration for a comprehensive EI strategy. Assess business process, applications, and data in tandem to understand where enterprise integration will fit in your organization.
- Don’t start by boiling the ocean and get bogged down in mapping out the entire organization. For the purposes of the strategy, narrow your focus to a set of related high-value processes to identify ways to improve integration.
Impact and Result
- Begin your enterprise strategy formation by identifying if your organization places emphasis on enabling operational excellence or predictive modeling/analytics.
- Enterprise integration needs to bring together business process, applications, and data, in that order. Kick-start the process of identifying opportunities for improvement by creating business process maps that incorporate how applications and data are coordinated to support business activities.
- Revisit the corporate drivers after integration mapping activities to identify the primary use cases for improvement.
- Prepare for the next steps of carrying out the strategy by reviewing a variety of solution options.
- Develop a compelling business case by consolidating the outputs of your mapping activities, establishing metrics for a specific process (or set of processes), and quantifying the benefits.
Member Testimonials
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Welk Resort Group Inc.
Guided Implementation
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Workshop: Build Effective Enterprise Integration on the Back of Business Process
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Position Enterprise Integration
The Purpose
- Discuss the general approach for creating a holistic enterprise integration strategy.
- Define the initial direction and drivers.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Strategy development team with responsibilities identified.
- Clear initial direction for the strategy based on senior stakeholder input.
Activities
Outputs
Define the driving statements for your EI strategy.
- Vision, mission, and values for enterprise integration
Develop a RACI chart.
- RACI chart for strategy development
Discuss the current state of enterprise integration.
- Documentation of past integration projects
Establish the initial direction of your strategy by surveying senior stakeholders.
- Chief Enterprise Integration Officer job description template
Module 2: Explore the Lenses of Enterprise Integration
The Purpose
- Build a comprehensive map of what integration looks like for your target business processes.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Clear documentation of the integration environment, encompassing process, data, and applications.
Activities
Outputs
Develop level-0 and level-1 business capability diagrams.
- Business capability maps
Identify the business processes of focus, based on relevance to overall corporate drivers.
Complete process flow diagrams.
- Business process flow diagrams
Begin identifying the applications that are involved in each step of your process.
Detail the connections/interactions between the applications in your business processes.
Draw a current state diagram for application integration.
- Current state integration diagram
Identify the data elements created, used, and stored throughout the processes, as well as systems of record.
- Completed integration map
Module 3: Develop the Enterprise Integration Strategy
The Purpose
- Review the outputs of the integration mapping activities.
- Educate strategy team on the potential integration solutions.
- Consolidate the findings of the activities into a compelling strategy presentation.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Integration improvement opportunities are identified.
- Direction and drivers for enterprise integration are finalized.
- Understanding of the benefits and limitations of some integration solutions.
Activities
Outputs
Discuss the observations/challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Refine the focus of the strategy by conducting a more detailed stakeholder survey.
Review the most common integration solutions for process, applications, and data.
Create a future state integration architecture diagram.
Define the IT and business critical success factors for EI.
Articulate the risks with pursuing (and not pursuing) an EI strategy.
- Critical success factors and risks for enterprise integration
Quantify the monetary benefits of the EI strategy.
- Monetary benefits of enterprise integration
Discuss best practices for presenting the strategy and organize the presentation content.
- Completed enterprise integration strategy presentation
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Guided Implementation 1: Position enterprise integration within your organization
- Call 1: Discuss past experiences with implementing enterprise integration and the value of creating a strategy
- Call 2: Identify which stakeholders should be involved and discuss the recommended focuses for enterprise integration
Guided Implementation 2: Explore the lenses of enterprise integration
- Call 1: Discuss Info-Tech’s approach to integration mapping
- Call 2: Discuss the current state of application integration and things to consider when improving it
- Call 3: Discuss the importance of identifying the data and information assets that are enabling business activities
Guided Implementation 3: Develop the enterprise integration strategy
- Call 1: Review your integration summary and discuss the observations, challenges, and opportunities for improvement
- Call 2: Discuss solution options, depending on which aspect of integration you want to improve
- Call 3: Consolidate all the activity outputs into a cohesive business case for the strategy
Contributors
- Albert Hui, Principal, Data Economist
- Hariharan Ganesarethinam, Director, Enterprise Architecture and Integration
- Joseph Markus, Canada Chief Solution Architect, Avanade Canada Inc.
- Shahrokh Mohseni, Head of Enterprise Architecture and Integration, Mobile Broadband Network Limited
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