When we use the term ‘end-to-end integration’ what exactly do we mean? There’s an answer, but it might not be the one you’re expecting.
Depending on your perspective or your day-to-day role, you probably have a different idea of what you want to see within an overall business or process flow.
One way to look at people within a company is in terms of personas. A persona is just a way of characterizing what someone in a given role should know about a given subject, or in this case, what/how much visibility do they need into your company’s integration systems.
And they’re helpful because some of the personas we will consider here are going to affect this idea of what we mean by end-to-end visibility and end-to-end integration.
Your different personas might range from general “line of business” personnel to the integration teams who are the ones building out and using the integration tools.
Perhaps it may include the operations team responsible for maintaining the business processes at the technical level, and the customer service folks who are responsible for talking to customers and figuring out what exactly needs to be done in order to support them.
In terms of visibility, you must look at each of those personas and determine what they might require from a visibility solution. Exactly what does each need to see in order to do their job?
Line of Business
The line of business persona will look at the business (or department or business unit) as a whole.
It’s about having visibility into the activity of the business — not necessarily a particular integration flow, but more trending information, e.g., how are the orders varying today, compared with yesterday, or last week?
Customer Service
Compare that with the visibility needs of your customer service team.
They’re going to be looking at a set of customers they’re responding to, either trying to be proactive with some of those bigger customers, or also looking to be reactive as customers encounter different problems.
The customer service team is going to need end-to-end visibility over an individual customer’s transactions.
Integration
The integration team is going to want visibility into the individual integration flows underneath the business processes and how they’re connected.
They want to know what the right flow of information is, where it’s coming from and going to, whether it’s from a business partner’s system or from their own internal environment, and how the flow needs to be architected when it’s put together.
