Chapter 64. Know Your Integration Points
THE HEARTACHE OF EVERY SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, development engineer, and software project manager is systems integration. No matter how promising a newly created application, a freshly purchased software package, or a long-awaited, new-feature-laden upgrade, the business value rests in getting it to work smoothly within the existing company system.
If you are an experienced project manager, but new to the information technology arena, don't let the term integration confuse you. Integration simply means linking together all of your various software programs so that all of the subsystems work together to give you more functionality than you could gain from any one application on its own. For example, you want data entry to occur only once and the information to flow smoothly to sales representatives, to accounts payable and receivable, and into other systems that allow various employees to pull up the information they want, regardless of the software interface they open.
Unfortunately, it's often a tense time when new software upgrades are required. They may introduce trouble into a smoothly running process flow. Recently, we had a situation where an upgrade was scheduled for one of our systems. During the upgrade process, the vendor encountered unexpected errors.
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