Just because there’s a land rush towards SaaS business applications like Salesforce for some of your business applications, it doesn’t mean that your content and data are all going to be housed on that platform. In reality, you have a combination of cloud applications, cloud content that may apply across several applications, and on-premise content; users end up searching in multiple places for information in order to do a single transaction.
In this paper, sponsored by Intellective (who have a bridging product for enterprise content/data with SaaS business applications), I wrote about some of the architecture and design issues that you need to consider when you’re linking these systems together. Here’s the introduction:
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions provide significant utility and value for standard business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), human resources (HR), accounting, insurance claims management, and email. These “systems of engagement” provide a modern and agile user experience that guides workers through actions and enables collaboration. However, they rarely replace the core “systems of record”, and don’t provide the range of content services required by most organizations.
This creates an issue when, for example, a customer service worker’s primary environment is Salesforce CRM, but for every Salesforce activity they may also need to access multiple systems of record to update customer files, view regulatory documentation or initiate line-of-business (LOB) processes not supported in Salesforce. The worker spends too much time looking for information, risks missing relevant content in their searches, and may forget to update the same information in multiple systems.
The solution is to integrate enterprise content from the systems of record – data, process and documents – directly with the primary user-facing system of engagement, such that the worker sees a single integrated view of everything required to complete the task at hand. The worker completes their work more efficiently and accurately because they’re not wasting time searching for information; data is automatically updated between systems, reducing data entry effort and errors.
Head on over to get the full paper (registration required).