Enterprise Information Systems: The Problem of Integration

The time and attention of humans is required to integrate the information created, analyzed, and stored by departmental functions. Many impediments to accounting information system integration within the enterprise are easily identifiable, the chief of these being the existence of disconnected information systems that are native to individual functional areas of the organization. These native, function-based information systems are not integrated in any automated sense; instead, cross-functional information systems are integrated by the ultimate software system: people.

Of course, the entire organization must grow to survive, and business process growth inevitably requires storage and retrieval of additional information in departmental database servers, the nexus of business process growth. Such inter-departmental integration challenges are common, as managers require performance reporting that reflects a highly fluid business environment. Even the information systems within departmental functions can grow and morph to introduce intra-departmental integration challenges.

Integration can be partially achieved by integrating similar types of systems and finally the reporting output from those systems (Dunn, Cherrington, & Hollander, 2005). Information system planning can reduce the number and scope of information pockets stored in the various functional silos within the business enterprise by building systems from scratch or obtaining enterprise wide accounting systems. The key concept to understand in information system integration is to re-engineer business processes along with concomitant accounting information systems from the ground-up and avoid partial patching of information systems to achieve necessary integration. However, the low hanging fruit in accounting system re-engineering may be simply capturing and recording the same information with shorter elapsed time and fewer inaccuracies, not necessarily re-engineering the entire business process. The trade-offs seem a matter of project scope.

Reference

Dunn, C., Cherrington, J.O., & Hollander. A.S. (2005). Enterprise information systems: A patterned-based approach, 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.