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.
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.
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.