This is part of Solutions Review’s Premium Content Series, a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in maturing software categories. In this submission, Exalate CEO Francis Martens offers a complete introduction to cross-company integrations.
Businesses are constantly adapting to the changing environment. Technology must evolve rapidly while companies must collaborate seamlessly. When it comes to digital transformation initiatives, software integration has risen to the top of the priority list.
The next step is to integrate into a global network of connected companies that work together in a structured way. This will enable teams and organizations to collaborate more effectively, stay ahead of the competition, and meet the needs of customers and businesses.
Task Management Systems to Become a Commodity in the Near Future
Everyone nowadays keeps a list of tasks to complete, track, and report. And people keep track of these tasks in their own way, whether it’s through emails, spreadsheet line entries, or personal task list managers like Trello, Google Tasks, or Microsoft To- Do.
But personal task lists are no longer enough when working in a team on a shared project. Team members need to exchange statuses, discuss details or manage workload. When you get to this point, it’s time to bring in a task management system like monday.com, Freshdesk, Jira, ServiceNow, or Salesforce, among many others.
These tools make it possible to get a good overview of a project, track progress, assign tasks to different team members, and set deadlines, while ensuring that work is completed in an efficient and orderly manner.
During the pandemic, the number of companies venturing into a digital transformation, installing and using this type of technology has increased significantly. When people are limited to working from home, the need for registering work in some systems increases – white boards with post-it notes no longer work. Businesses have started using task management systems to effectively track time, generate project status reports, and keep a good handle on who is doing what by when. And of course to achieve efficiency.
For example, a project manager may focus on managing tasks rather than gathering the information needed to perform these tasks. By using the commenting feature, the details of a task can be recorded within the context of the task itself rather than scattered throughout.
multiple locations. And if the tool is used consistently, setting milestones and reviewing plan changes will be simpler.
Prioritization and task management are both fundamental parts of a project, so technologies for task management and project management are combined.
Due to increased efficiency, the number of companies using this technology is growing at a whopping 30% per year, and Grandviewresearch predicts that this market will grow to 55B Usd by 2028.
This essentially means that task management systems – like many other tools – will become a commodity in the near future.
The Need for Cross-Company Integrations
Many professional service companies that specialize in task management system deployments, at the forefront of digital transformation, have seen the advantages that these tools provide. But they also discovered an interesting challenge.
Once you’ve implemented a proper task management system internally, you’ll want to extend the efficiency gains to your external partners. “Partners” in this definition refers to all businesses with which you regularly work and with whom you need to exchange information in a structured manner.
Currently for many companies, most of this information exchange is done via email, spreadsheets, virtual meetings, or the like. And so much information is lost because not everyone has the discipline to keep up to date with the relevant work in their own environment.
Many of the benefits of task management systems are lost when working outside company boundaries due to delays and miscommunication. This can cause bottlenecks and even conflicts.
One solution is to invite the other team to use your own system. However, there are two main reasons why businesses are reluctant to take that step: security and scalability.
Managing project information stored in multiple systems is next to impossible. When a service provider is required to work on multiple systems, then there is a high chance that they will be stuck with a major organizational challenge.
The best way to make sure everything runs smoothly is to have your team work on your processes in your own environment.
If so, how do you resolve this conflict? You need a way to integrate your partners’ work management systems into your own, so that tasks raised in your partner’s environment can be solved in yours. The integration ensures that everything stays up to date in a secure way.
An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution could be the way forward here. With iPaaS, you can standardize how data flows between different systems and how teams/companies interact with each other.
Plus, you can streamline business processes, relieving companies of the effort to develop in-house integrations or leverage native capabilities, as an iPaaS solution will be more cost-effective.
One thing is certain: the need for cross-company integrations will increase dramatically. This is a logical extension of the digital transformation that many businesses are undergoing.
However, the integration of systems is not an easy journey, but its result will be worthwhile.
The Inclusion journey – Challenges and Benefits
Consider a digital agency in charge of executing a customer’s marketing campaign(s).
There is a need for cross-company integration to build a bridge between the customer tracker and the digital agency tracker.
Integrating within an organization is a significant undertaking. You must first align the processes and ensure proper mapping between the two environments. Next, make the implementation easy to maintain. There is also the question of security.
Then, when the integration works, various difficulties arise – the data is not synced due to a hiccup; or the mapping was not completed correctly, causing a return to the drawing board. As a result, many CIOs view integration projects as something to be avoided.
Cross-company integrations involve the same challenges, and they are more complex because each organization has its own environment, information models, workflows, escalation paths, security management, permissions, and more.
For architectural reasons, integration solutions designed for establishing an internal integration cannot handle the challenges of a cross-company integration.
When setting up an integration, the main goal is to keep dependencies in a limited, well-documented set. Each dependency can have an impact on integration. For example, if two workflows are integrated and one workflow is redefined with an additional workflow status, this may result in the integration being redefined.
If integration is too tight, making changes to internal processes results in failed integrations, and unhappy business users.
Loose coupling is essential to achieve a sustainable union. And that requires a distributed integration where each party can autonomously define how the integration is implemented.
Towards a Global Network of Connected Companies
After successful implementation of cross-company integration, businesses will greatly benefit from smooth coordination of activities and increased efficiency. Teams from different organizations can collaborate without switching environments, as if the external team were an extension of yourself.
This single integration serves as a proof-of-concept (POC) for multi-company integration, where multiple partners integrate their task management systems with yours.
An example is the Catena-X network – an initiative in the automotive industry to move to a common exchange of information throughout the supply chain.
A multi-company integration can be seen as a hub network, with a central task management system (yours) connected to multiple partners.
Different businesses have linked up to collaborate in many ways, resulting in interesting networking patterns.
This was also noticed at the beginning of the Internet, when many tcp networks began to interconnect to form the world wide web.
Task management networks are expected to follow this example. Imagine a future where you can connect your task management system to a global network of connected companies and start collaborating with anyone on the network at the flick of a switch.
We are witnessing the birth of this network and actively contributing to its growth.
Conclusion
Mergers in companies are no longer a good-to-have, but a necessity. More and more organizations are recognizing this whenever teams need to collaborate efficiently while using their thrusted environment.
The effort to solve this operational problem will result in the proliferation of task management networks connecting related companies.
As the logical next step in the digital transformation process, cross/multi company integrations are the stepping stone to a world wide network of connected companies working together in a structured way.
As an experienced Software Development Manager, Francis Martens has worked for several start-ups and multinationals in various roles from Development Manager to VP of Engineering. He has coached teams of developers in these positions. Francis then founded iDalko in 2011.