The 5 Surprising Truths About B2B Integration Challenges

So you’ve been doing your research on enterprise integration, and you know it’s in your company’s best interests to comprehensively automate your processes.  You may even know that it’s necessary and only a matter of time before your competitors have left you in the dust without it.  At this point, you’re aware of the benefits of integration, but you’re also becoming painfully aware of the challenges associated with it.  You’ve heard horror stories, and you’re stuck in limbo trying to figure out whether or not your company is ready to take the risk.  If this sounds anything like you, then maybe the following five surprising truths about enterprise integration challenges will help clarify some things for you: 

1. IT Is Not Readily Available, But It’s Not Their Fault

For most business-to-business integration projects, the business team ends up having to ultimately rely upon IT.  After setting it all up by working with the customer to define requirements, the business team is typically forced to sit back and wait… and wait… and wait… for IT to implement the solution which meets those requirements.  Here’s the truth: IT doesn’t have a budget which prioritizes integration.  On top of that, their workload is heavy with projects that are higher up on their priority list. This, of course, leads to delayed revenue, and the business team ends up with the appearance of being difficult to do business with.  I have seen this happen over and over again with too many customers.  Don’t think for a second, though, that this is the fault of IT.  The answer is not to blame them; the answer is to equip business users with the tools they need to perform integration tasks themselves, easing the burden for IT and allowing them focus on higher-value strategic initiatives.  

2. Between Implementation and Customer Onboarding, There May Be No End In Sight…

When you consider the complex technologies and methodologies involved in an integration project, it’s actually not much of a surprise that the process can take several months to complete.  What many businesses don’t realize, however, is that, between implementation and customer onboarding, it could take years to implement.  Don’t even think about the costs associated with this. And without an automated customer onboarding system in place, many businesses have to repeat the agonizing process over and over and over again. The answer is not, however, to lower your expectations and assume that integration must be costly and time-consuming; the answer is to simplify the process from beginning to end. This means a solution that doesn’t require coding, and has in place an automated system for onboarding customers easily and repeatedly. 

3. Someone Told You Connecting To External Applications Would Be Easy?

One of the worst roadblocks that customers run into is the crash-course education in connecting with other companies’ systems and applications.  Connectivity issues range from data layout to the correlation of internal data with external data.  Without extensive experience (or a comprehensive integration solution) the process of connecting with external applications is an overwhelming endeavor.  

4. Some Challenges Truly Are Inevitable

Of course, some issues will also be harder to deal with than others. From a technical perspective, the most challenging aspect of integration is high performance transactional processing, and there’s no way around that. With regards to non-technical issues, it’s particularly challenging when there is little to no documentation regarding legacy systems, or when there are multiple teams/vendors all involved in the project.  Regardless of preparedness, there will be some challenges like these that are impossible to avoid.

 5. Other Challenges Aren’t As Bad As You’d Think…

On the other hand, some challenges are easier to handle than you’d expect them to be. For example, ETL integration solutions are relatively easier to solve because the requirements in most cases are straight-forward in nature, and there is less cross-dependency between IT, business and the customer.  Other challenges that are easier to handle than you’d think are some of the previously mentioned ones.

Deepak Singh is the CTO and co-founder of Adeptia, an enterprise-class integration platform company that enables business users to perform simple business-to-business integration operations, allowing IT to stop being the bottleneck and focus on governance, control, and strategic business initiatives.