IT integration - Merging of the minds.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Anthony Harrington.

A recent IBM survey of chief financial officers in large listed companies found that more than 70% of CFOs felt their IT systems could not deliver a comprehensive real-time view of the information they regarded as essential. The nub of the problem comes down to the raft of disparate systems companies acquire over time, and the difficulties involved in getting many of these systems to talk to each other.

Although boards know they could benefit from integrating their IT infrastructure, they also have a real fear of getting bogged down by grandiose IT projects that promise much and deliver little - and enterprise-wide integration sounds exactly like that kind of project.

In today's economic climate, everyone wants to focus on return on investment and on projects that can be delivered in short timescales. So one of the key approaches to integration in the past few years has been to deal with the problem tactically rather than at an enterprise-wide integration level.

There are some steep challenges to overcome along the way to a successful integration. According to Likhit Wagle, strategy and change leader for IBM Business Consulting Services, the barriers to standardisation can be formidable. "A common feeling that chief executives and finance directors encounter from their troops when they discuss enterprise-wide integration is the feeling that it is just too difficult to achieve," Wagle says.

Yet the rewards can be huge, both in terms of freeing up funds that are being consumed in wasteful duplication of effort, and in terms of giving a large organisation the ability to be more agile than its competitors.