Integration

Can mean many things to stakeholders within an enterprise wide system. To IT managers it may mean connecting web based front ends to legacy systems. To customers or staff it may mean not having to remember different usernames for different systems. For executives it may mean having a single IT infrastructure and contact point for all your different business areas. MRM Consultancy is well positioned within the current IT market to address these challenges under a comprehensive approach. Mergers, acquisitions, politics, competition, and personal agendas naturally shift institutions toward a fragmented, less integrated state. To address these tendencies, corporations must deploy strategies that institute integration as a binding principle across business units, IT, and third parties. This does not mean that every overlapping or redundant business unit, process, data structure, and system needs to be rationalized down to a single occurrence. It means that management should establish a level of cohesiveness where these redundancies are recognized and accommodated through collaborative solutions that collectively move the enterprise toward fulfilment of its prime purpose. The main roadblock to integration is the current state of organizational infrastructures, business processes, and the data and systems that support these infrastructures and processes. Organizational and operational issues are often directly responsible for poorly integrated systems and data. More important, poorly integrated enterprises are ill-equipped to resolve integration problems because the leadership needed to address these issues is splintered across business units that are not inclined to collaborate. This complicates the resolution process because addressing information architecture integration requires addressing the organizational fragmentation that spawned these issues in the first place. The integration challenge is a difficult one, but it is manageable if companies take the time to think about the integration challenge in holistic terms, as opposed to the narrowly focused approaches being deployed in many companies today. Institutionalizing the principle of integration, driven by business requirements in full collaboration with IT, provides a new beginning for companies that will continue to become more fragmented and less cohesive unless they can stem the tide Integration.