Integration platforms will enable business leaders to make better
informed decisions
Over the past decade, the IT industry has experienced some
extraordinary ups and downs. From the breakthroughs, revolutions
and, to use the dotcom catchphrase, paradigm shifts, there have
been major advances as well as some hard lessons.
Although change has been a constant force, what stands out during
my 10 years at software company SAP is the consistent focus by
businesses using technology to achieve one core goal: visibility.
As the IT industry has evolved from the mainframe to client/ server
architecture to the latest services-oriented architecture, there
have been parallel advances in the pursuit of greater visibility.
The relentless march towards gathering, integrating and analysing
information about business operations has proven a key driver in
the dramatic increase in business productivity.
From the back office to the front office, across financial
operations, human resources and the supply chain, to new product
development and customer services, companies are using information
more adeptly to drive growth, reduce costs and ultimately make
better business decisions.
In 1979, in the era of the mainframe, systems such as SAP R/2 first
began helping companies understand the value of information
integration. These early enterprise resource planning software
applications demonstrated that technology could organise and
integrate functions such as general ledger and accounting, enabling
companies to automate many back-office processes and gain a single
view of information to which executives could react.
As the client/server model gained acceptance in the late 1980s, it
gave companies more computing power to extend the value of
integration and gain visibility beyond the back office. The
client/server software architecture's versatile, message-based and
modular infrastructure helped to improve usability, flexibility,
interoperability and scalability, leading to the introduction of an
entirely new set of business applications.
Organisations realised their human resources departments, supply
chains and customer service centres could all be underpinned by
business applications. On top of that, they could better analyse
the data from these systems with datawarehousing software that
"crunched the numbers" to make sense of it all.
The advent of the internet spurred an even faster pace of
evolution, bringing us closer to complete business visibility.
Technology innovations helped further integrate disparate business
processes such as supply chain and customer services with
enterprise resource planning. Integrated information from across
the business helped executives achieve greater visibility to react
even more quickly.
Today, once again, visibility is the clear driver as we edge closer
to achieving our mission. The evolution has taken us from
integrating a small set of back-office business operations to
integrating many business operations and processes.
Yet to drive further innovation, we are now setting forth a vision
of the services-oriented architecture that enables firms to further
integrate heterogeneous applications and information sources.
This is possible with new integration and application platforms
that embrace internet standards such as HTTP and XML. This new
generation of platforms ensures openness and interoperability so
organisations can gain a single, unified view of operations across
all of the applications they use. These platforms also reduce the
costly integration between systems, lowering total cost of
ownership and increasing the flexibility to introduce and change
business processes.
Integration may lack glamour, but with sound business thinking, it
is proving to have a profound effect. From the upheaval in the boom
times of the 1990s through to the bursting of the dotcom bubble,
successful companies are those that have focused on innovation,
integration and visibility. With the confidence of experience and a
maturity that only comes through tough lessons learnt, we are
moving forward to achieve the mission.
Simon Harrison is chief technology officer at
SAP UK