10 Business Opportunities You Open Up When You Adopt An “Integration First” Strategy.

Integration is one of the most strategic investments a business can make today, yet is often the least thought out and most undervalued. It sounds a little obvious, right?  Integrating your business systems enables a holistic view of your customers, your business data, and your operational processes. It creates a better customer experience and improves your internal workflow. When done right – you’ll be more efficient, productive, and profitable.

To really build the awareness and business case for integration, we reached out to our Integration Engineering and Architecture experts to get their view on some of the cool things businesses can do when they are fully integrated. Here are some excerpts below:

1. Security and Authentication. Strategic and well governed integration practices make it easy for developers to set up secure authentication and authorisation across a complex application landscape. Enterprise integration provides an opportunity to improve the security of enterprise data assets, as well as a checkpoint for Zero Trust Architecture.
   
   
2. Access disparate data for improved analytics and insights: Never throw away data again, when you can actually configure and integrate it in the integration layer so the data can be processed, analysed and put in dashboards to gain insights on productivity and opportunities.
   
   
3. Get new products to market quicker: An external facing integration strategy powered by APIs allows businesses to connect external web services or digital capabilities to roll out products easier and quicker.
   
   
4. Data mashup and orchestration. With integration, you can place organisations and solutions in integration platforms as a service with APIs. Opening the data up to others enables people to create more solutions (e.g. faster warehouse processing or better digital-health records). Enterprise architecture enables others to create solutions on top of what you, and others, have created. This openness and enablement fosters innovation and collaboration in areas that previously wouldn’t have been considered.
   
   
5. Connect IoT: Enterprise integration used to mean infrastructure, middleware and back-end. However, now with microservices and API strategy, we can now integrate all applications, including everything in the cloud layer and wearables. Interesting integrations between Apple Watch, smartphones and IoT devices allow us to bring in more digital services than ever.
   
   
6. Unlock and access data for remote teams: Enterprise integration transforms business to allow instantly retrievable information, as well as enabling staff with company data online and offline. For example, integrating your CRM, OS and product applications can enable field sales or technology teams to access sales or support material from wherever, whenever.
   
   
7. Scale, scale, scale! Integration allows businesses to grow geographically, or grow headcount or revenue without a huge IT headache. When deeply integrated, our customers can get data to where it’s useful in a timely way and they have the ability to pull performance data from around the world at any time.
   
   
8. Impress the Executive and Investors. When Executive teams or Investors or M&A’s are seeking company information, they are often impressed by a company’s ability to to aggregate all information, add intelligence and act on the information. Some of these insights include financial data, customer purchasing metrics, business intelligence, real estate and maintenance insights and how to improve operational efficiency.
   
   
9. Improve the customer experience. This is an obvious one – most organisations want to find ways to impress their customers and keep them returning. Having a simple, integrated and digital experience for ordering, support and transactions ensures that customers don’t get clogged up on phone lines, or frustrated enough to move off to a competitor.
   
   
10. Open the doors for partnering for innovation. Creating new ecosystems that reach new groups through partnership with complementary organisations fosters innovation. API connectivity fosters this – an example of this is many digital media services (such as Facebook or television channels) integrating their entire chain of digital media and feeding it back into an artificial intelligence partners and continuously tweaking to optimise revenue, and customer personalisation. Other examples are the integration of neo-banks to traditional banks to enable new and innovative digital banking services never seen before.

Can we help you to enable any of these opportunities? Sure! Read a little about us below

Integration Works helps clients use, collate and share data more effectively across on-prem, cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

We employ the best in integration Architecture experts and DevOps teams who believe connected technology is fundamental to high performing organisations. Paired with our range of world-class integration platform partners, including AWS, Azure, Kong, GCP, Mulesoft and WS02, our experts work closely with our clients to align emerging technologies with reliable and proven best integration practices.

With offices in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, our teams can help you with:

• Integration Maturity Assessments, Microservices Strategy, API Strategy and Integration Planning;
• Integration and Cloud Technology Selection and Procurement,
• Integration Architecture and Engineering Services to connect Apps, Data, Legacy, IoT, Cloud, On-Premise and Multi-Cloud;
• Integrating for Speed, Scale and Velocity with Automation-First Integration Containerisation & DevOps; and
• Integration Support and Managed Services for future-proofed integration resiliency.

Learn more about our services here.