How much time is wasted in your organization transferring information between systems that do not communicate with each other? Salespeople put information into a sales database, finance transfers it to a spreadsheet to analyze results, marketing is gathering information from several sources, and accounting needs to enter everything into the accounting system.
Like most business leaders, you probably realize that there are a lot of inefficiencies in your organization, and you are not sure what to do about it. You may have even tried to integrate things in the past and it failed to work, costing you lots of time and money. So, how can you integrate the collecting and analyzing of all the data in your business the right way?
The key is to ask the right questions before even looking at integration options:
- What are the needs of the different departments?
- What are the current work flows? Should these be maintained?
- Who should have access to which types of data?
- How resistant are users likely to be to any changes and what are their incentives to make any changes?
- How easily can the current systems be integrated or will it be necessary to migrate at least some portion of the current systems?
Benefits of Integration
If you choose to integrate your systems, you get three key benefits:
- Time Savings - your staff no longer needs to re-enter data that is already in another system. This allows your staff to get more done with less people.
- Increased Accuracy - only entering data once and automating as much as possible reduces the likelihood for error. Therefore, you can be more confident in the data when making decisions.
- Real-Time Data Access - when there is no waiting for data to be entered, you have access to real-time data to allow you to make decisions faster. This keeps you ahead of your competition.
The technology is here for system integration. It is just requires that you pause and analyze your needs along with how your systems can work together. It can often help to use a CIO Service to be sure you are asking the right questions and looking at your full range of options for cost efficient integration.
About Skyriver IT
Our mission at Skyriver IT is to professionalize the IT services business. We provide small and mid-size companies with CIO Services to help them make better IT and business decisions. If you would like to discuss how system integration could help your company be more productive, please feel free call (858) 812-9322 or visit www.SkyriverIT.com
