Integrated Solutions

Workflow automation isn’t new – you’ve been doing it for years. You have workflows within your IT applications, within your HR applications, within your supply chain applications, and within most of the other tools you use to run your business. Those workflows ensure that your processes are being executed properly, that nothing is falling through the cracks, and that the right work is being done by the right resources.

But your business isn’t compartmentalized in departmental applications. Your business workflows span multiple applications and multiple departments. When you onboard a new employee, there’s work to be done in HR, Facilities, IT, Finance, Security, Training, and more. When you change a manufacturing process, there are follow-on changes that need to be made right across the business. In fact, very few of your important business workflows exist purely in one application, and so you may have already thought about how to join them together.

So how are applications connected together to enable these inter-application workflows? At worst, there’s a human involved – who has to remember to kick off a new process (and manually copy data) when the previous one completes. This type of “integration” is far more common than you might think, but it’s horribly inefficient and prone to errors.

A marginally better approach might be to build a point-to-point integration between applications – but that results in a non-scalable solution that needs to be recreated whenever the connected apps are updated, and one that quickly turns into unmanageable (and often undocumented) integration spaghetti.

Perhaps you’ve considered an iPaaS solution to connect applications across your business. They’re certainly better than the above options, but they still don’t really solve the problem. Sure, you may be able to get data from one system to pass through to another, but you’re just moving chunks of data without context, and YOU are still on the hook to build and maintain the integration. These solutions are like the IKEA of integration – you still build the integration yourself … just from larger pieces.

But what if there was a way that you could put all of your workflows into an uber- workflow? We could think about this the same way that we used “managers of managers” to bring together all our network/system/event management tools – and create a “workflow of workflows”. In this model, integrations would be process-aware, end-to-end, and they would operate in real-time.

The workflow of workflows approach is more than just a fancy way of talking about integration – this is how you deliver complete, integrated solutions to your business, and that’s the end goal. In fact, the integrations themselves aren’t really that important – its the process that matters. You didn’t implement automated workflows just because you needed to automate process in individual departments – you need to automate process business-wide … because that’s how you make a business-wide difference.

At Perspectium, we believe that integrated solutions can’t rely on human intervention, spaghetti code, or iPaaS toolkits that move data without context. We believe that processes that span the business should ACTUALLY span the business – and that’s only possible with a workflow of workflows approach.

Find out more about how you can get a workflow of workflows at perspectium.com