Interface or embedded development?

A fair and crucial question that affects your staff, infrastructure, initial and on-going costs.

The platform and development environments of more and more IT Business Solutions (ERP, CRM and POS) are open and provide standardised development environments in order to better interface with another software application. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a major contribution to developing cost effective interfaces and mitigating stability and availability risks.

At the same time, this enables software vendors to develop within the IT Business Solution and therefore provides the same business functions and logic in the same database and interface.

With that in mind, what factors do determine whether the development of an interface or development of new functionality within in the IT Business Solution is better?

My thoughts on this in priority order are:

1. Enabling people
2. Business risk
3. Initial cost and recurring cost (development and licenses)

Enabling people

Let’s not forget that businesses don’t gain insights, make decisions, close deals or invent new products and services.

People do.

Your staff is the most valuable asset to your business. Software is instrumental to enabling your staff to get the best business insights, make the best decision and bottom-line to be effective, productive and to excel the business.

Keep that thought, determine now what is the best for your staff, different applications and therefore interfaces or one interface? This might well be the case but keep the business flow into account, what does it mean for staff to complete a business process that interlinks with this separate application. Does it affect the productivity? Can it create errors? If it is a complete separate process than this specialised solution might be well the case if not, do understand the consequences and the cost of the problem that might occur.

Business Risk.

Business risk in terms of stability and the availability of the interface. An interface means per definition more complexity and extra efforts from a platform and possible database maintenance perspective and business reporting. Having tools in place that monitor the transport of the information and alert staff if transport of data fails.

It should not be a showstopper; it should be a factor to take into account to make a considered call.

Initial cost and recurring cost.

What are the different cost components of these two options?

I hope this provides you some rich insights on whether an interface is the best for your people and therefore business or an integrated business solution?