‘Things’ naturally just feed off each other. Butterflies and hurricanes, housing markets and recession, US economy and the world economy. There are no two systems on our globe that maintain complete independence of each other.
Whether they work together smoothly or grind gears is worthy of debate.
It’s a butterfly effect and it applies to businesses and their systems as well as it does to butterflies and hurricanes. No two business towers operate without affecting the other — finance and marketing — manufacturing and advertising — all are intertwined at some [if not many] x-y point in a process. In reality, business is chaos.
This is where business -smartly- queues up technology in an effort to dissect and then reunite their departments so that company data is routed and analyzed at its suitable level. Things need to work horizontally as well as vertically.
Ideally, the horizontal marriage of two business towers should be automated, but as we see in many cases, [even with technology] the outcome is disparate. Oftentimes you’ll find systems that don’t talk to each other and in some instances cause more manual labor than if the technology didn’t exist at all — injecting human error and skewing the ‘bottom line.’
From CEO to janitor, business information systems need to seamlessly integrate the efforts of all folks — at every level of the business chain. Easily said, but substantially difficult to execute. But ultimately, your company’s systems are what deliver net business value to your customer and ensure you turn a profit — efficiency in these systems is paramount.
Across [virtually] all your business towers, efficiency is mandatory — and it needs to be front-and-center on your staff’s scope and high on everyone’s list of goals. Translating efficiency into specific IT goals can [at times] be like mixing oil and water, but with open inter-departmental discussion, frequent process design review and suitable business applications, linking a company’s business towers together -through technology- can become second nature — and very profitable.
