Just to get some decent in-te-gra-tion for my legacy app-li-ca-tion…
OK so the song is a bit of a stretch but I was fortunate enough to sing 500 miles on Karaoke at the OnBase Community Live conference with a good Scottish friend of mine Glenn Gibson from Hyland Software.
I also had the opportunity to sing the same song with Chunky Custard (they’re a band) at the Customer Owned Banking Association (COBA) Convention in Adelaide. As I originally hail from the East Coast of Scotland it’s a song close to my heart and I have sometimes been accused of looking like The Proclaimers.
These two performances got me thinking about application integration. What? You may rightly ask. How does singing 500 miles twice make any connection with integration – bear with me…
A karaoke machine and a live band are two different beasts. Karaoke is fixed, other than the pitch and tempo you can’t change the song that much. A live band on the other hand has many more facets and gives leeway to change pitch, duration, tempo, move verses around, add solos and so on.
So where is this analogy going?
Legacy applications are like the Karaoke. You are constrained by what you can do – not often because of what is possible but largely due to lengthy and usually cost prohibitive integration. Many businesses would like the flexibility of a band whilst relying on the stability of existing legacy apps.
There are likely myriad reasons why legacy apps are still being used in your business however integrating these applications with documents and process can sometimes be difficult and complex.
It is possible however to extend and enhance the capability and provide the flexibility of the band without the need for cost prohibitive integrations. You can achieve flexibility from your existing applications and give your organisation additional time to define a strategy for their decommissioning and/or replacement.
This flexibility allows you to integrate at multiple points, change a number of facets and be agile enough to enhance further when required – like a live band. Furthermore, what if the overall cost of the band and with its inherent advantages was also cheaper than the multiple karaoke machines needed to deliver each solution? In the majority of cases it is!
With many ECM platforms today you can have documents and process integrated directly with your existing applications at the user interface. You can extend and enhance these apps and provide decision workers the necessary documents to make a decision without investing in extensive and potentially cost prohibitive integration.
We at Blumark have delivered this for many customers and the outcomes from both an efficiency and user experience improvement is significant.
If you are going to walk 500 miles (or spend 500 miles) integrating these apps with content and process, you would be wise to look at what the band has to offer.
If you have legacy, current or web based apps that you want to content and process enable, contact Blumark by phone on 1300 258 275 or by email.