Integrations Part 4: The Six Steps of a Successful Integration

Over the course of the past few weeks, we have been taking a deep dive into the world of Integrations. First, we discussed what it means to integrate your applications. Then, we looked at the major benefits of an integration. After that, we explored the various measures you need to take in planning your integration and the different types of integration methodologies available to you.

By now, you’re an expert when it comes to integrations. You understand how important it is to have all of your data consistent and auto-populated across multiple applications. It makes your company more efficient and cost-effective, enables your customers and employees to be much happier, provides a single point of truth and drives innovation and adaptability. Beyond that, you’ve determined which applications and data you want to integrate and considered what effect these changes will have on your company both today and in the future. Finally, you and your integration partner have finalized which methodology you will use to integrate your applications and data.

Now, you’re ready to get started, but what are the six hurdles you need to jump to make it happen?

1. Determine your needs, system specifications, and feasibility

There is some planning you need to do before actually getting started. One of the most important aspects of the integration process is identifying what you need to be integrated! After that, having a detailed understanding of your application and its capabilities will help you understand what your limitations will be. From here, you can conduct a feasibility analysis, based on research, that will help you make the right decisions.

This will make the process efficient, seamless, and most importantly, easy.

2. Construction Plan

Here, you will build the system architecture that will determine how all of your applications will be integrated with each other. Moreover, blueprints of the proposed integration plan will be created in order to guide later steps.

3. Management

With a construction plan in place, it’s time to work out how the entire system will be managed and supported for the long term. Some of the processes carried out during this step are risk factor calculations, project execution planning, alternative listing, and more. Don’t overlook this step because failing to conduct a management plan may leave your organization lost down the road.

4. Designing your system integration

This step includes creating both the logical and physical designs that were designed for your integration. The blueprints from step one come into play here as they will include preliminary designs. More detailed designs and system tests will then take place during this step.

5. Implement the integration

Now that your system design has been created, you will verify and then implement it. It’s important to make sure that every test comes back either error-free or with a mechanism to handle any errors; if not, it’s time to re-verify the system!

6. Evaluate and enjoy!

The final step involves thoroughly checking that the functionality of your integration is meeting requirements. Monitoring and evaluating your integration properly means you can modify and/or enhance all of its various components if need be.

This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.