Throughout our experience as a company, we have learned how cautiously vendors tend to phrase how their solutions are “integrated” with each other or with other vendors. The way it’s marketed can look fantastic on a piece of collateral or on a website, but when it comes down to actually using the solution, it can be far different.
With the success of our last blog post “3 Reasons Why Employers Are Requiring Single Platform Workforce Management Solutions,” we thought it would be prudent to continue to elaborate on the difference between integrated and single systems.
It is very evident that the market is moving away from the integration of disparate systems to “play nice” with each other and towards the use of single systems that are architected and designed as a cohesive suite of applications. If you ask five different people what integration means, you’ll likely get five different answers. Instead of trying to come up with a single definition of what integration means, we want to help you navigate through the marketing fluff and show you two of the ways you can expect your solutions to work with each other.
Single Platform – This is the most ideal scenario for your company. A single platform for multiple applications SHOULD mean that this is a platform built from the ground up on one database. In saying this, there would be only one database for the data housed within all of these applications.
What does that mean and why does that matter to you?
This kind of solution enables you to have a single record for:
- An employee in the case of workforce management or human capital management
- A prospect in the case of sales and marketing, or more specifically CRM and marketing automation
- A customer in the case of a support platform and CRM
All of these would result in only one field throughout all your solutions for a last name. The biggest benefit to this is really that there is no exchange of data that needs to take place – essentially all of these solutions can act as a single application. This kind of solution essentially goes beyond any formal definition of integration where separate applications or software solutions are connected together.
Beware, though! Vendors using this phrase may be talking about an integrated platform…
Integrated Platform – An integrated platform may be branded as a “single platform” or vice versa, but these are usually yesterday’s applications cobbled together with a common or similar interface that makes it seem like a single platform. We like to call this lipstick on a pig. One way to uncover this is by asking whether or not all these solutions were built on a single database from the ground up. If they were developed separately, that should be a red flag, as what you’re evaluating is likely just an integrated platform.
It’s not bad… but it’s not the best. And with all the consumer software technology we use today, we expect the best. There has to be an exchange of data with an integrated platform between applications. The main difference between this and the single platform mentioned above is that changes made in one application likely won’t flow over to the other application simultaneously, or in ‘real-time’.
What does that mean and why does that matter to you?
- Without a single database:
- There are multiple employee, prospect, or customer records that need to be maintained. And as a result, this could mean having to enter the same data more than once.
- Additionally, with these separate records, this would require separate implementations, and therefore, a longer time before you’re actually up and running with your solution.
- Also, if data isn’t exchanged in real-time, it impacts the integrity of the data and you may not necessarily be able to make your decisions in real-time because you’re waiting for a scheduled data exchange between Application A and Application B.
Integration can be overwhelming when we start uncovering the level at which the integration takes place, whether it’s simply a single sign-on or a tighter, more seamless integration, a one way integration vs. a two way integration, etc.
What does this all mean??? Your best bet is to just find a single platform of applications that all reside on a single database. It’s what we’ve all come to expect from software. The only problem is one vendor can’t specialize in all of these different areas… unless we’re talking about workforce management.
You can also visit us at www.mosaices.com and call us at 303-645-4270. We look forward to an opportunity to speak with you.
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