Portfolio
Getting IT Together
Source: CRM Magazine Published: Jul 2003
With phrases like real-time enterprise, 360-degree view of the customer, and single instance of truth floating around the business world, there seems to be a lot more talk than actual substance to many of the claims that companies can access ERP, CRM, and other systems instantly from one interface. But integration can enable this to happen, says George Schussel, founder of DCI. “Integration is the backbone of where things are going, moving towards the real-time enterprise,” he says. “How a company accomplishes this can take a number of directions,” including looking at integration from the application layer, a business processes layer, or at the data layer.
Whatever the path to integration a company takes, it must first understand how open standards are affecting integration efforts, consider the dos and don’ts of integration, and learn from how other companies are successfully integrating CRM with back-end systems, and data sources with CRM.
Whatever system a company chooses, before integration can work, IT managers need to decide what parts of the organization should be integrated first, Schussel says. “You can’t integrate everything at once,” he says. “You need to understand your business processes, find out what it takes to stay competitive, and integrate the data and systems that will help you do that first.”
