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46 Chapter 2 • Systems Integration

SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
Today, perhaps more than ever before, it is essential that companies be efficient and effective
with their products and services. There are many drivers in organizations for needing integrated
systems. The ability to respond quickly to market conditions is a key part of protecting your
customer base against the incursions of a global set of hungry competitors. It is also the key to
growing or retaining that customer base. In other words, the inability to meet the market demand
effectively can have unfortunate consequences. Having too much or not enough inventory, or
having the inventory at the wrong place and the wrong time, can have a disastrous impact on a
company’s profitability—and even survivability. Integrated systems allow companies to accom-
plish something that has alluded most to date: the linking of demand- and supply-side functions
in a way that enables a quick and flexible response to changes in demand. Developing processes
to support integrated systems is not an easy task, but it can be done, as evidenced by industry
leaders like Dell, Amazon, and others that have already put integrated systems in place.

Logical Vs. Physical SI
At the logical or human level, systems integration means developing information systems that
allow organizations to share data with all of its stakeholders based on their need and authoriza-
tion. It also means, however, allowing access to a shared data resource by people from different
functional areas of the organization. On the other hand, at the physical or technical level, systems
integration means providing seamless connectivity between heterogeneous application systems.
Most organizations today have accumulated a wide variety of applications that come from a
variety of vendors and run on different operating systems and work with many databases. Some
applications are old legacy systems that may need to work with the newer Web-based architec-
tures. Having seamless connectivity in this heterogeneous computing environment is a complex
task, but necessary for an organization to be efficient. This is where the term “Middleware”
started. This software provides the appearance of seamless data presentation to the end user and
maintains data integrity and synchronization within each application system database.
In order to achieve the logical integration and fit a company business model, organizational
structures, processes, and employee roles and responsibilities need change. As mentioned earlier,
business process reengineering goes beyond integrating heterogeneous technologies; it involves
changing the mind-set of the employees in the organization, encouraging and enabling them to do
their tasks in a new way. Before approaching the integration at the systems level, an organization
has to overcome the people barrier, which involves educating and motivating employees to put
aside their turf issues (or interdepartmental barriers) and work together as a team. Shifting the
focus of employees from achieving the departmental goals to organizational goals is an essential
task for management. In addition, changes will be required in the traditional hierarchical manage-
ment structures that are purely functionally oriented. For example, in the cross-functional
structure a budget analyst may work both for a financial manager and directly with a product
manager. Thus, the product manager will be responsible for the hiring or performance appraisal
for this budget analyst, who is reporting to the financial manager. This may sound very confusing
and chaotic; however, this relationship complexity must be maintained for a flat and fluid organi-
zational structure that can be easily adapted to the changing needs of the environment. Teamwork
is essential if organizations want to break-up functional silos and have workers from all levels of
management collaborate on solving organizational problems; furthermore, teamwork must be
continually reinforced by having top management stress the achievement of organizational goals,
rather than departmental goals, and team goals instead of individual goals.