Islands of automation are no stranger to the modern enterprise. The ever-expanding nature of IT infrastructure is introducing new technologies and architectural paradigms, often antiquating critical solution platforms, thereby creating a disconnect between business applications. Cluttered data builds up, inefficient processing depletes partner and customer experience while organizations seek rapid-response insights only to receive confusion. The detachment ultimately hinders vital opportunities for growth and success.
The Original Castaways
Not long after Gilligan Island premiered in the 1960s did corporations begin capturing operational data to aid their accounting organizations for billing, invoicing, and payments. These early-stage solutions from utilities, insurance, and banks sought to curb the explosion of clerical staff and mistakes for operational improvements. This data was always account-based, and customers were treated and addresses as nothing more than labels to the accounts.
By the 1980s, the power of enterprise processing systems branched into all forms of Operational and Planning data but always for substantial business units from procurement, inventory, accounts receivables, and financial planning. Still, these systems were siloed but yet quite valuable.
The last thirty years have seen these “systems” retired, but the legacy of how they were designed and why they were structured lingers to this day as tribal knowledge within your ecosystem. Acknowledging this legacy and accepting one can’t wish it away. You need to enable your teams to embrace assets of the past while we FOCUS on the differentiating solutions of the future!
Problems for the Castaways
As your business appetite explodes for new capabilities, platforms, and services, your data grows exponentially. The opportunity to harness one’s legacy to modernize or replace is a fleeting dream. These two roadblocks exacerbate one another, significantly limiting your company’s ability to expand (both internally and externally). Some examples of business problems include the following:
- Dissociation within customer-centric systems: CRM, Loyalty Programs, on-line presence, social media engagement, and traditional ERP systems.
- New Application Integration Services are resembling the legacy point-to-point services; you “thought” these were being retired.
- Limited data sharing between cloud and on-premise applications
- Unintegrated HR and finance/accounting systems
- Inefficient, disjointed, and ad hoc processing
- Duplicate and unclean data
The most critical step of a company’s bridging efforts is to harness their legacy platforms or databases with services that look and behave as modern, object-oriented microservices that will likely be the long-term replacement, but give you the capability NOW. With our help, your islands of automation will become an interconnected web of clean data, interdepartmental communication, and efficient performance.
This is a SIMPLE, but critical integration pattern if you want to results in a matter of days rather than quarters in solutions ranging from Data Pipelines to Platform Migrations.
Let’s Connect
So, what do you do? You can’t afford to let go of your legacy systems, but you need something to bridge the gap and someone to help you build the infrastructure to do so. Through strong partnerships and competing integration strategies, XTIVIA can help your enterprise efficiently transport information and develop a “write once, reuse often” approach to your data.
Bridging the gap isn’t just a way to connect your data; it’s an opportunity to empower your business. Whatever your reason for building a connection between applications — enhancing sales, acquiring better business insight, or improving internal operations — a data integration journey with XTIVIA as your partner will help you accomplish your goals.
If you’d like more information on how your organization can reap the business benefits of connecting your castaway applications, feel free to reach out to us here. And be sure to check out some of our other blogs for more information on data integration and data management.