Integrating IT systems has long been a contentious issue. On the one hand, there are those who support integration exercises as a way to save money and extend the functional lives of systems, while others take the view that legacy systems should be retired and new pre-integrated systems bought, installed and customised to the business's requirements.
Hedley Hurwitz, managing director of Magix Integration, believes that while there is always a time to retire legacy systems and opt for new technologies, this is not always the correct option. “Often the costs or amount of work required to switch to new systems is not worth the effort, especially when customisations have been made to existing systems that can not easily be transferred to the new one.”
Hurwitz adds that the cost factor plays an important role in today's economy, where reducing spend and squeezing the most out of existing infrastructure is crucial. Integrating existing systems extends their lives at a reasonable cost, preserves any company-specific customisations and ensures many existing in-house skills remain viable.
The concept of integration is not always a large-scale project costing millions. “Integration can include areas such as automating existing manual tasks, modernising the interfaces of historical systems, combining data from disparate systems to present more meaningful information to the business, as well as creating automated and audited communication between business entities and third-parties,” Hurwitz explains.
He does warn, however, that tools themselves are not the focus of an integration project, but simply used to connect the dots. The architecture and design of the integration layer is the most important and strategic aspect of the project.
Many businesses find that once the architecture is defined and an integration or middleware requirement identified, the skills to deliver this are often not housed within the organisation, or if they are, the IT department lacks the additional capacity required to deliver the solution. The choice is then to make the necessary internal changes or to rely on external assistance.
In a cost-averse economy, retaining external skills to implement the solution is often the correct choice as expenses are limited to the short or medium term. Additionally, while third-parties are focused on implementation, internal skills can be adapted and areas of responsibility changed to allow for the long-term internal maintenance of the project without hiring additional resources.
Cost-sensitive companies are today relying on integration to sweat their assets without creating any innovative or growth costs that would negatively affect the future of the business. Well-planned and executed integration projects not only reduce IT spend, but also allow the company to access advanced technologies and functionality without reinventing their infrastructure.
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