Thomas Otter
(photo via cc attribution licence. ms4jah thanks.
Most of my working career encouraged me to chant the mantra, “we are integrated.” I have spent the last year or so thinking about integration in a more objective light. Integration for me has undergone a de-reification process.
I was doing a presentation about HR technology recently, and I was talking about the impressive growth of niche vendors in various HCM areas, such as recruitment, learning, performance management and succession planning. One of the IT folks in the audience was getting a bit agitated, this was chaffing against his integration faith.
My new view is integration is like weather. The statement, we have weather today, is accurate but not particularly useful. This is similar to the statement our system is integrated.
What is integrated with what? What is the purpose of the integration? What value does the integration bring? What overhead does the integration create?
Once you know what is integrated, you can rationally assess the value of integration. Integration can be of significant value, it can help break silos, reduce data capture and improve data quality.
But integration can be an excuse not to move quickly, it can hinder innovation and create overhead, it can be a reason not to do something new.
Sometimes retyping stuff is okay. Tracking 50 top executives in a succession planning application doesn’t require real time integration with 20 separate global HR systems. In this case, typing is probably the correct integration approach. If you are doing performance appraisals for 300,000 employees then you had better have a plan on how to handle organization unit changes. This will involve a sophisticated integration framework with your system of record. Both of these are forms of integration.
When evaluating software view integration rationally, don’t put it on a pedestal, but don’t dismiss it. Understand clearly what is being integrated, and what the value of that integration is. Integration doesn’t trump functionality. Without the right functionality, integration is not worth much.
But also beware of those that say integration is easy to do.
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Category: software design software industry Tags: integration, software
