The truth is out there, but finding it is not easy. Integration is becoming a big issue for many organisations
Most organisations (big and small) are characterised by a collection of disparate and disconnected systems that do or don’t communicate to varying degrees. The reasons are myriad but the consequences are the same: instead of a single version of the truth to help guide decisions, tactics and strategy, there are pockets or ‘silos’ of data scattered across applications, databases, departments, and geographic locations.
Businesses have been living with this for years. But initiatives such as Basel II, IFRS, and Sarbanes–Oxley, that all mandate clarity and transparency, have brought integration – or the lack of it – to the forefront for many organisations. Finance professionals increasingly find themselves in the unenviable position of having to sign off on numbers and, in doing so, vouch for the validity of the underlying data. So they need to be able to access this data quickly and easily.
This calls for a systems infrastructure that can provide a window into the operational data that drives the numbers; something that enables the finance function to drill down and across its financials to customer level and product level, and relate these to other aspects of the financial infrastructure, if necessary. But this is tricky when systems are not integrated.
Some organisations try to deal with their need for better integration by reinventing the wheel; they simplify their systems spaghetti by replacing the many with one or more better connected or integrated alternatives. Others opt for the sort of add-on that promises to provide the appearance of integration, without delivering the reality. This can take the form of single subject or departmental ‘data marts’, where data is taken from a number of systems and transformed into a common format, so that it can be available for interrogation and analysis by various users or systems. Or it could take the form of data warehousing, where the same sort of process takes place, but on a much larger scale.
Unfortunately, all of these approaches are as complex (and costly) as they sound, whether you are a multinational with thousands of different systems across the world, or a small firm of accountants that purchased its accounting, contact management, and personal tax products from different suppliers.
Web services may offer a way forward. Combined with data integration technology, they could make interoperability problems a thing of the past. Thanks to common standards, widely supported by software developers and vendors, web services make it a lot easier for disparate systems to talk to one another. So one day, businesses of all shapes and sizes may take the availability of accurate, timely and complete information for granted. Meanwhile, they can only live with – and learn from – yesterday’s decisions.