Small Business Guide to Integration

By now everyone knows the Internet didn't herald a new age of business, change every traditional paradigm or create a new economy. What it did do, however, and what it can still do for you is create enormous efficiencies in your business. By using the net you can streamline everything from communications to purchasing to fulfilling orders.

But you can't accomplish that with a lot of piecemeal programs. The key to streamlining business processes is what this week’s interviewee calls integration. Satya Nadella, Senior VP of Microsoft's bCentral, has made a business out of helping small firms run theirs, and he believes that by integrating business processes firms can realize enormous efficiencies.

"The Internet can be a great thing for a small business only if it is within the context of easing their pain points with regard to the activities that they do today," says Satya. "Perhaps they were faxing, but the documents they were faxing were coming out of some line of business accounting system they had bought. So if we want to introduce a more streamlined way of doing things, more or less replacing the fax machine that had been forced on them by a big trading partner, we better be able to integrate that with the line of business system."

Advice on bringing ecommerce, the customer database and finances together coming right up from Satya.

Why Integrate?

Because when you do, you save both money and time.

"It all comes down to getting their business processes or their activities done," says Satya. "The reason why all of these processes need to come together is to be able to address customer needs. If an order has been taken and the customer is waiting to see when it’s going to be fulfilled, just to be able to serve up that information on a website so that the customer can actually track the progress of the order requires all of those three things [ecommerce, customer database, finances] to be integrated in a tight fashion."

"Today, what it basically results in is a couple of messages on the voice mail that the small business will have to address individually. But just imagine if you could go to a small business and say, 'A lot of what you today spend your time on doing can be automated, and it can be much more durable, if you will, from a data fidelity point of view,'" says Satya .

What you need to do such a thing isn't an extra pair of hands or an assistant. Software packages exist that can bring together the threads of your small business - and what you'll lay out initially for the technology will be worth it when you see the time, effort and money-saving such software makes possible.

Choosing an Integrator

But you can't just buy an integration software package off the shelf for $59, at least, not yet. If you choose to integrate, you'll have to have some help setting it up. Many companies offer such services -
how do you choose the one right for you?
"The key thing there is getting somebody who’s knowledgeable about their industry," says Satya. "One of the problems of talking about a small business marketplace is that there is no such thing as a small business marketplace. It’s a non-homogenous marketplace. You have doctors, dentists, plumbers, lawyers and so on. They all have vastly different needs. The key piece would be for them to be able to work with someone who can take all these horizontal technologies and then be able to apply them to their particular industry or vertical. If you just start trying to aggregate these services on your own, you will end up with a hodge-podge of things. So think about this in the context of a solution that applies to your industry."

Once you've found an industry specialist, you'll have to be very clear of what it is you're looking for. Look for a provider with experience building your type of system, one who can build a scalable system that gives your business room to grow.

"One of the things that has led to constraints on being able to deliver more technology to small businesses is very ad hoc decisions of purchase," he says. "People just went out and bought an accounting system or just went out and bought a contact management system, not realizing that the contact management system and the accounting system really need to be tightly integrated to get their jobs done. As long as the system integrator, the VAR or even their own folks are helping them make these decisions, they must keep in their mind that there has got to be an overall picture that needs to emerge as we aggregate or purchase more technology. Then it becomes a lot better for the small businesses and for the integrator servicing them."

Ask For Help

With so many integration services and packages available, it can be tough to know which partners to choose. During a typical RFP process, everybody promises they can do the job. How do you choose the right outsourcing partners? Ask for references from similar small businesses, says Satya .

"I would look for some real experience and real case studies before I went with anybody who just promised that they could get the job done. Experienced integrators will have good references," he says.

And a good, experienced integrator will also be able to help you define the scope of your own needs.

"Most small businesses do not have IT folks, so it’s better to actually go out and look for somebody who can guide them through the process. But the requirements, the actual needs, must be articulated by the small business. I think that’s got to be the driver as opposed to a vendor or a reseller pitching their product and making a sale," he says.

Integrating your systems and processes is a big job. But once you realize the efficiencies such systems make possible, it's easy to see they're a good investment. If you plan to stay the size you are forever, you may not be worried about future efficiencies. But for businesses with their eye on the ball and the future, integration is the only future that makes sense for solid growth.