Loose application integration gets better

“Businesses leaving information delivery to local offices and departments and seeking custom systems integration for individual systems and processes are recklessly wasting company resources.” So says Richard Cook, CEO of FormScape, the electronic documentation software firm. His company yesterday launched what it described as a “fresh approach to ‘enterprise information delivery’,” founded on the fact that expensive integration projects aren’t borne of a desire to integrate disparate applications for their own sake, but to take data from them to provide aggregated information to people and systems. Hence the current rise of the notion of ‘loose integration’, where extraction tools drive content to data warehouses, hubs or web portals to do just that, without going the whole hog of integration. And this is the key: “Enterprise Information Delivery should be on the agenda of boardrooms everywhere,” says Cook. His company’s new FormScape for Unix enterprise information delivery system (following on the existing NT version) and DocsOnline 2.0 real-time central document repository and directory suites, due for release this summer, will enable existing information to be captured directly from multiple applications on multiple platforms at the application output level for delivery, presentation and exchange throughout an enterprise using web technologies. It means a good level of “joined-up enterprise communications” without the costs, risks and time scales of full enterprise application integration (EAI). Cook notes that in many cases, applications involved in each stage of running a business process produce information required to be conveyed to the next stage as ‘content’ within documents. It’s this that presents the opportunity for the firm’s approach. Cook insists that manufacturers will be able to realise the benefits of greater ‘communication’ between their disparate CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management) and ERP systems. And the same will apply where merger and acquisition activity has resulted in incompatible systems and applications. “Application vendors worry about application functionality rather than presenting or tracking information content in the documents produced,” he observes. “Our focus is the document. FormScape enables the extraction, management, tracking and delivery of document content. We offer an information exchange that doesn’t involve the reengineering of proven business processes or expensive custom development.” It’s worth taking this kind of approach seriously. Integrated business communications are important, but the costs of achieving them by some of the older techniques make some of what would clearly be desirable prohibitive. As Cook puts it: “The ultimate goal is to breakdown all barriers to information exchange... Companies will then be able to unleash the total value of information across all processes for the greatest return to everyone in the enterprise and beyond. “Corporations no longer have to invest millions in expensive and potentially risky and sometimes quite fruitless integration effort at the application level. Instead, [our] approach enables the capture and delivery of information from legacy, ERP, e-business and other systems for centralised production, storage, distribution and recall across any channel, be it the web, email or even by letter.” The result: “Better customer service, more efficient supply chains and a generally faster, smarter and profitable business.”