Systems integration
The current systems, for the great majority, are divided into parts that deal with specific aspects of the life of the organization: almost always administration, budget, budget (economic-financial aspects), but also components for personnel, containing all the details that are relevant to the company. Each of these parts of the system integrates, in its own way, elements of the 3 facets (as a rule, each module does it differently).
With the evolution of the company, with the enlargement and with the change in its structure, there is a need for a more complicated information system, integrating other data collected and other modules. This implies that for the integrations actually made, the response is highly efficient. The integration is done substantially by integrating the different facets on a single level : each component has a which refers to various aspects, and we integrate all the information of that .
In most cases, i they are relationships and the integration is at the information level, but some technologies allow you to connect objects.
If you want to integrate two facets in a different way, the techniques made available by the ERPs are not easy to use. In fact, this type of integration is still missing in ERPs: you can do some integration of the data collected da different, but this requires an extraction of the information before it can be integrated into the data-mining component.
Integration efficiency is a critical aspect for the company, since in today's organizations, one of the main problems is to respond adequately and quickly to not easily predictable market evolutions. For example, the emergence of new economic markets such as
the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese (called "BRIC"), poses problems for Italian companies, which must understand how to enter those markets and need information that is not immediately available in an ERP. For this reason, there is a need for data warehouse and data mining. The managers of the organization require that the information they need is provided with response times of between a week and a month: outside this range, the company makes decisions without the data collected required and information technology loses a role, thus being perceived as an obstacle or problem. By creating a Business Intelligence system, it is therefore necessary to think about all the possible questions that the manager will be able to ask you and prepare the system to be able to provide an answer. Information technology must follow the development of the company!
If the company is not buying, but expanding its market around the world year after year, the system must be adapted to accommodate the expansion.
If the company is outsourcing all central resources, the platform must be able to evolve in this direction. There must therefore be a cyclical evolution of the application platform, with a period of between 6 and 12 months. Above the application platform, however, there is the technological one, which is of a substantially different nature, since it describes the way in which information technologies are managed; it is fundamental for the success of the choices at the application platform level and for the resolution of problems. Its evolutionary cycle in this case is multi-year and must be constantly monitored to ensure that the architecture is the best for our needs.
There are therefore 3 levels to manage to offer valid solutions:
- technological platform (multi-year)
- application platform (6/12 months)
- individual problems (week / month)
This division into levels, however, is not easy to identify: although it is present, it is not clear-cut. Just think of the example ENI, which is currently developing a system of cloud computing, born with different ideas from those of cloud, and then subsequently changed because the company's needs also changed.
This division also explains why in ERP systems the use of patches prevails, which give quick answers to new problems, but do not improve the system architecture, on the contrary they tend to worsen it.
Integrating components is an important task, because integrated components save time and reduce errors due to manual transcription of data collected. The facts of an organization are the same everywhere (administration of the services purchased or provided, taking into account what enters and leaves the company, etc.) and on the basis of these the company establishes its objectives (how much to buy, how much to produce, etc. ). Information technology supports the business not only in these aspects, but also through the use of tools such as e-mail, intranet, videoconferencing systems, E-commerce, etc.
Technology allows you to remove some tasks, but creates others.
In the organizational activity there are always redundant works with respect to the production of useful information, so we must keep in mind 3 facts:
- excess work cannot be immediately eliminated;
- if the performance remains unchanged, there is a reduction in the work required;
- however, if we have designed the system to improve the user experience, users will require human intervention.
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