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Link up all parts of your business
Analysis: The tools you need...

By Anthony Plewes

Published: Wednesday 14 March 2007

Sharing data across an organisation is no easy task. Luckily help is at hand. Anthony Plewes examines the tools, technologies and techniques that can make the process a lot simpler.

One of the biggest impediments to becoming a joined-up enterprise is often the IT infrastructure. Many small and medium enterprises have individual systems to address a particular business need such as an accounting package for finance or a customer database for marketing. Unfortunately these sorts of 'point solutions' create departmental silos making it very difficult to share information across the company.

So what are the options to remedy the situation?

The joined-up enterprise

Read more about how to encourage collaboration and efficient processes across your organisation in our special report.

One simple way out of the information silo maze is to buy integrated software that combines various different applications into a single package. Integrated applications are beneficial because many processes span different departments across organisations.

Bundling applications into a single platform is common with larger enterprise applications, where ERP, HR and CRM functionality is often combined. More recently vendors of software for smaller companies have also woken up to this trend.

John Gledhill, global director of application product management at Lawson Software, which specialises in integrated CRM/ERP systems for medium-sized companies, says: "When deploying an integrated system, the big payback is the integration and working together as one organisation. Our customers like using the same language, the same information across the organisation and that no information silos are created."

While buying integrated software helps companies become more joined-up, new applications are rarely deployed into a vacuum. Businesses will have to decide which applications and data to keep when they move over to the new system. Many organisations use this as an opportunity to do some house keeping and data cleansing. When legacy applications remain, they will need to be integrated with the new systems.

This application integration is the ultimate weapon in the battle against information silos. Both companies deploying new tools and those wanting to share information and processes between existing systems will have to undertake some form of application integration.

SOA

There are a number of approaches enterprise can take; the first of these is integration at the program level. Jon Gamlen, principal consultant at Software AG, says: "This means you re-engineer the applications so that they can create services. Essentially this is adding service-oriented architecture (SOA) functionality to your existing applications."

In a nutshell, SOA enables applications to create services that can be called by other applications. SOA is not tied to any specific technology and is extremely powerful for integration because an application using another's service does not need to know anything about how the service has been created.

The main drawback for SMEs is that SOA is complicated and consequently very expensive to deploy. Richard Hall, CTO at systems integrator Avanade, explains: "SOA requires companies to expose and repurpose their applications across the organisation." These re-engineering costs are likely to put any extensive SOA plans out of the reach of most smaller businesses.

Web services

Other integration approaches are likely to be more attractive to SMEs, as they can offer non-invasive means of integration and don't require organisations to re-engineer their back-end systems.

Web services offer many of the same advantages of SOA when integrating applications. David Pinches, head of product management at software maker Sage, says: "Web services is a much better match for small businesses. It could be considered a lightweight SOA and allows companies to expose data and processes to other applications."

Many vendors are now incorporating web services functionality in their products which makes it easier for smaller companies to integrate new software with their existing applications. However, this functionality isn't 'out of the box' as such, and SMEs should be prepared for some integration costs.

Data integration

The final approach is to integrate applications at the data level. This involves combining the data outputs of different applications into a single user-interface. Enterprise portals were a popular incarnation of this technique but they have faded in popularity in recent years, as businesses found portals became useless if they were not an integral part of business processes because they need to reflect any change in business practices.

More recently a development of the enterprise portal concept has been found in so-called composite applications. These have risen to prominence on the crest of the web 2.0 wave in the shape of 'mash-ups' but have been around in the business space for some time. David Davies, CEO of Corizon, which develops tools for creating composite applications in contact centre environments, explains how they work.

He says: "Composite applications are a step beyond portals which just gather together information. They work by extracting the building blocks from an application and then combining them together. So instead of a user having to switch between five different applications they are able to access exactly the same functionality from a single application and user interface."

To replicate the functionality of multiple applications, composite applications need analysts who look at how users interact with the applications, such as how they translate the different data types between the different applications.

There is no one definitive 'right' way to use tools to become a more joined-up enterprises. SMEs need to decide what suits them best and it is likely to be a combination of all of the above approaches. Integrated tools will help unify data and processes in one part of the organisation and then application integration will tidy up the rest.