Process Integrity
Quick. How many companies do you buy software from? And where’s the center of the universe?
If you’re like most companies, you probably buy software from at least a dozen different suppliers. Some of these provide user productivity at the desktop and others help you manage your systems. Roughly half of them, however, run important business processes.
Unfortunately, each of these applications thinks of itself as the center of the universe. The data it contains is pristine; all other data is suspect. If each application behaves that way, then how do you decide which application has the “best” data? This is the data integrity issue. It’s complicated.
Even more complicated is the process integrity issue. Each application controls part of the process. Within its boundaries, the software maintains the integrity of the process. But there’s no simple way to ensure that the process maintains integrity as it flows from one application to another. This is a particularly hard problem to solve if you choose a best-of-breed strategy. Each application focuses on being the best, not on sharing the best. It’s like a playground full of kids who don’t like each other.
At Lawson, we realize that we have to co-exist gracefully with other software packages. Unlike the BigCo vendors, we’re not trying to displace every other vendor. We realize that you want some choices but that you want your choices to work well together. We’re not trying to dominate. We’re trying to integrate. The BigCo vendors can be the leaders in pushing others out. We’ll be the leader in pulling others in.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve introduced the Lawson ProcessFlow Integrator. The idea is to give business analysts a graphical user interface to drag and drop components together to form business processes that maintain integrity. The components can – of course – come from Lawson but they can also come from other vendors as well.
It’s simple. We’re just trying to make it all work together. To do so, we know we need to play well with others. If you’d like to run a playground where the kids actually get along well, give us a call.
To read more about the Lawson ProcessFlow Integrator, click here.
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