Advanced How To Guides

Systems Integration

Resourcing Integrations

Conceptually, taking advantage of new technologies sounds great; turning that promise into reality is another issue. The adoption of advanced communications technologies by SMEs has been severely limited by cost and complexity.

For most business people, keeping up with the ever-shifting tides of communications technology is nearly impossible. A business owner faces a bewildering array of WAN access options - POTS, 56K, T1, Fractional T1, ISDN (BRI or PRI), xDSL (SDSL or HDSL2 or ?), cable modems, etc., and the nagging feeling that the moment they invest in one technology, another will prove better and cheaper - and that's just to enable access. Don't get hung up on understanding all of the technical jargon - just as you don't need to know how your business telephone call gets routed from your desk to your customer, you just need to know and manage the costs of your telephone communications.

To further complicate matters, SMEs need to deal with half a dozen different vendors to satisfy their communications needs - telephone equipment, data networking equipment, their local phone service, their long distance service, their Internet connectivity and a computer store to fill in the missing pieces. After gathering all these piece-parts, the SME itself is usually responsible for tying them all together. The result is wasted time, money and patience.

Deciding between technological choices, let alone vendors, can quickly become a full time job. Most SMEs aren't looking to become communications experts. Some would rather spend their time arranging holidays, selling houses, or curing the sick than trying to figure out how to add a printer or even a new employee to the network. SMEs hope to leverage new technologies without having to manage them - to utilise the power of applications without having to worry about the underlying platforms.
Service providers, whose core competencies are in building and managing networks, can do so more efficiently than SMEs. They have the expertise to stay abreast of technology, and the ability to amortise their expensive networking professionals across different accounts/ customers. Traditionally, communications companies have been divided into product and service camps as well as voice and data camps. However, all that is changing, as service providers begin to respond to this opportunity.

Conclusion

SMEs have largely been neglected by integration providers - for years, providers focused on the very large organisations which have many complex systems, but large budgets. With these generally well served, the vendors are increasingly looking to SMEs, which have their own specific needs, but fewer resources to address problems.

Taking the time to understand and document the business requirements is absolutely essential to ensuring the alignment of IT with the business strategy, and makes the project plan easier to sell internally. Failure to accurately define business requirements can lead to wrong decisions and failed implementations.

An evolutionary project based approach to integration can reduce initial costs, show early returns and control; business risk while at the same time not precluding the eventual implementation of the enterprise-wide integration infrastructure. With clear planning and objective tool selection, selected integration projects can be deployed successfully with demonstrable business value, starting the journey to the fully integrated enterprise.