Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy

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The business is placing an increasing amount of pressure on IT to accommodate additional trading partners and data exchanges.
Despite the recognized importance of enhancing business-to-business (B2B) integration capabilities, many organizations struggle to define a strategy that will meet business and IT needs while providing a cost-effective solution.
IT often finds itself in a challenging situation uncertain of best methods and practices for leveraging people, process, technology, and data.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

There have been drastic changes to B2B reference architecture. There are new applications and cloud-based services that have emerged to simplify B2B integration. It may prove to be less expensive and strategic to take advantage of a B2B managed service provider rather than attempting to enhance your on-premise B2B capabilities.
Businesses need to reposition themselves, and their B2B strategy, to take advantage of the emerging API economy.

Impact and Result

Create a comprehensive strategy to allow your organization to reduce costs while increasing profits through seamless integration and real-time transactions.
Enhance efficiency by having clear, end-to-end visibility of your processes and with your trading partners.
Align IT with business needs from the beginning of the project to create and deliver a B2B integration strategy that is capable of scaling with business growth.
A fit-for-purpose strategic roadmap will assist in seamless integration with key trading partners.
Leverage best practices for trading partner management to achieve enhanced trading partner relationships.

Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy Research & Tools

1. Structure the project

Determine the B2B strategy goals, objectives, and scope, and identify the project participants and assign roles.

2. Gather the requirements

Derive B2B requirements from business goals and objectives, specific data exchange standards of trading partners, as well as people, process, technology, and data components of the future state.

3. Identify solutions

Determine the gaps between current and future maturity, and review and assess solution alternatives for people, processes, technology, and data.

4. Create the strategic roadmap

Select and prioritize B2B integration initiatives.

5. Make the business case

Effectively sell the value of a B2B integration strategy to obtain approval to proceed with implementation.

6. Implement the B2B integration strategy

Learn how to communicate initiatives with stakeholders that will be affected by change.

Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy visualization

Strong partnerships require seamless integration; don’t let lagging integration capabilities undermine your B2B relationships.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Get the help you need in this 1-phase advisory process. You'll receive 5 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Call 1: Structure the project

Establish the rationale for building a B2B integration strategy and structure the project: validate scope, stakeholders, assumptions, and constraints, and set metrics to measure success.
Call 2: Requirements gathering

Discuss the business goals and mapping them to IT objectives. Review partner survey results and look for opportunities for more integration with partners. Review the results of the trading partner protocol inventory and help segregate partners. Review the results of your B2B integration maturity assessment.
Call 3: Solution identification

Review results of the current state maturity assessment, and interpret gaps between current and target states. Review solution alternatives available to fill gaps. Discuss insource, outsource, and hybrid implementation alternatives.
Call 4: Solution selection and roadmap development

Review results of the TCO calculator and implementation alternative selection. Assist with definition of implementation and migration initiatives to move from current to target state.
Call 5: Review business case and implementation plan

Review the business case and provide insight into selling the case to senior management. Assist with plans for securing resources, communicating initiatives, and implementing the strategy.

Authors

Stewart Bond

Jenna Schroeder

Contributors

Informatica
Corix Group
KS Plastics
Interswitch
IntegrationWorks

Search Code: 74117
Last Revised: August 19, 2014

TAGS:

integration, B2B, business-to-business, data types, protocols, B2B standards, data exchange