Businesses have the greatest challenge and the largest opportunity to not only save cost but grow their business through streamlining of business processes and integrating current applications so that information is shared across lines of business. The three areas where integration will help make business faster and more competitive with higher information integrity are:

The Integrated View - Portals

Over the years, organizations have been creating many applications that each have their own user interface. This requires users to move from one browser to another to see each set of information. Additionally, information in each view often needs to be moved from one view to another - a very difficult task for engineering to do. This results in personnel inefficiencies, frustration and often impacting data integrity.

What portals do is help eliminate this problem by providing an "integrated view" of many applications. Portals can act as a consolidated executive view of all your applications limited only by screen real estate. Not only that, but once you get several of your applications within one browser portal view, personnel can transfer data between applications via the click of a mouse. Now, there still has to be engineering done to do this, but the mechanisms are in place based on evolving standards that makes the task much easier than without a portal framework.

Business Workflow and Process Management

Many businesses are currently moving sales orders, insurance and health claims and loan applications through a maze of people and departments and have been doing so for decades. Often, the process requires many people to be involved in the decision and work process, making it very difficult to track where the work is and the level of completion. With business growth and higher employment costs, there are not only greater savings in cost, but in ways to manage the growth of business through automation. Automation in this context is streamlining the workflow of these activities through process management.

Benefits

1. Get the work done faster often decreasing process time from days to hours.
2. Less cost through reduced levels of manual intervention switching from labour to systems intensive activities.
3. Lower error rates because boring and repetitive tasks are automated, freeing workers to focus on higher value tasks.
4. Get back your business - Nail down all the information embedded in employees heads into the software logic. This turns tacit employee knowledge into implicit corporate knowledge. Shifts the power.

Integrated Business and Applications

In large businesses, lines of business often set their own direction and in the process construct applications that have not integrated with other systems. At some point, it becomes critical within the organizations evolution to share not only data but the process in which the information flows. To achieve this integration, it requires that the applications and systems be able to pass requests between systems that often have different formats and requirements much in the way that a United Nations meeting requires interpreter for the all the delegates.