Delivering Digital Solutions with Systems Integration

Authored by Hiroshi Tahata, JDU Head, Fujitsu

It is no secret that digital transformation is indispensable to the future of businesses. No organization can envision a future where digital transformation doesn't play a crucial role in its growth. Before Covid-19, companies were already working to adapt new and transformative technologies into their business operations. The pandemic further accelerated this timeline and pushed businesses even harder to incorporate digital infrastructure into their core. While companies now work towards this goal, one of the most important things to remember is that digital transformation is not a destination. In fact, it is an adaptive and continued state of changes in processes and business methods, based on learning and trends. It helps to make businesses more agile, flexible, and scalable, and most importantly, save on money, both in the long and short term. 

One of the most important aspects of digital transformation is Systems Integration. In essence, systems integration (SI) is the process of connecting various IT systems, software, applications, and tools into one coordinated and unified system. SI links together various disparate business processes in a coherent manner to create one single functioning solution. 

Let us look at a real-world example to understand systems integration better. For instance, many workplaces have smart biometric attendance systems that mark employees’ in and out times. While this should ideally be sufficient, many companies also back this up with physical timesheets, which is usually a separate process. An integrated approach would ensure that these two different applications are connected and work together to solve the gaps faced in employee management, as opposed to having two applications to track employee attendance, and HR having to draw data from two different sources. This is just one of the many examples of SI, and this approach can be molded to fit any arm of a company such as finance, operations, sales, etc. 

Systems integration, thus, ensures that software-based systems are optimized within infrastructure programs so that they can yield the best operational capability and performance for end-users. Here are a few aspects to keep in mind while delivering system solutions with digital integration. 

• Selecting the right model for delivery: The process of integration can only begin once a detailed assessment there has been done of the systems that need integration, and a thorough understanding acquired. Mapping also must be carried out, of strategy and business requirements, to finalize a delivery model that is most suitable for achieving business goals. This is an important step because not all business requirements need an automation-based delivery model. 
• Digital Capability: As the number of digital users across the world continues to swell, Moore’s law on processor speed, Metcalfe’s law of networks and Gilder’s law on bandwidth are rewriting the rules of business. At a point like this, before providing digital solutions, it is necessary to analyze and conduct a survey of existing digital capabilities. Drawing an accurate picture of a company’s current software systems, and its technical specifications, and outlining all the integration requirements is a good starting point to determine an organization’s digital capabilities. 

Once an organization has gone through the above steps and decided to adopt an SI approach, there are several benefits that it can provide a company. 

1. Increased Efficiency:Once integrated systems connect various business processes together, there is an automatic state of efficiency that is generated by such a modernized IT environment. Whether it is entering data manually or having to physically pull data from multiple sources into one database, SI allows for fully formatted data to seamlessly move through an organization’s digital ecosystem. This not only brings in overall efficiency in operations but also helps employees pursue other meaningful and more productive tasks. 
2. Real-time Data Availability:In the business world today, data and its immediate availability determine success. Legacy tools that led to companies having to wait for financial data and analysis reports for days, or even months, are now a thing of the past. Today, integrated digital architecture driven by SI can ensure that organizations have access to real-time data to make quicker and smarter business decisions. 
3. Cost Effective:SI is not the expensive undertaking some might think it is. This is because systems integration eliminates the need for multiple data storage facilities to store the same data, i.e., SI allows for a methodical and integrated storing of data from multiple subsystems and categories. This helps companies to cut down on the cost of maintaining additional data storage space. Also, SI does away with the need for companies to spend on creating new and complex systems from scratch, as it leverages legacy systems and helps modernize them instead of scrapping them entirely.
4. Making Things Simple:Ultimately, an integrated digital infrastructure eliminates the need for multiple applications, SI ensures that there is one unified application that is easy to use and doesn’t require a company or its employees to look at different data sets or feed data into multiple applications. It simplifies business processes, making multiple actions possible from one single screen.  

Systems Integration can, thus, help a company to improve efficiency on a large scale and ensure that they are ready for a future that will be dominated by newer and improved digital technologies.