Business Interoperability: Seamless Integration of Processes

Are you an Apple ecosystem user? Have you experienced the seamless integration of each of their products, namely where you can take information from one of them, and effortlessly migrate it to another device? Imagine having a business where you could do this, but with processes. Now that technology changed the way we live. The high volume of data being transferred is insurmountable to handle with different systems. Without system integration, the data being transferred and gathered would take longer to convert to another set of systems. 

What Is Interoperability?

Interoperability is the ability of organizations to share data and processes between their information systems, with other organizations, and with their users or customers. This capability to communicate, execute programs, and transfer data among other systems that require the user with little or no knowledge is beneficial for organizational efficiency. For example, every single Apple products interoperable to one another, when you own an iPhone and MacBook, their systems are integrated through Apple’s iCloud services. 

How To Achieve Interoperability? 

Companies can achieve system interoperability through the implementation of specific systems such as cloud integration. Nowadays, as cloud-based solutions are a thing now, the accessibility and ease of data migration are faster, easier, and cheaper than it was before. However, organizations with large amounts of data may need to implement other solutions to achieve interoperability. Specifically, there are two levels to achieving business interoperability.

  1. Semantic Interoperability

Is the ability of computer systems and business partners to understand exchanged data in a common programming language. Semantic interoperability will integrate all gathered and stored data into a simplified and easily accessible database. That said, ease of access to data for customers, business partners, and other systems through efficient means of automated data sharing between applications, databases, and other computer systems is a crucial component throughout networked computerized systems, especially interoperability in business management systems.

  1. Technical Interoperability

This level of interoperability is a set of different information systems that have the ability to communicate and exchange information with each other through a different set of programming languages or codes. 

Benefits Of Interoperability

  1. Cohesive information

Uniformity of information systems that operate in isolation is identified and redundant information is located in order to accomplish more fluid communication between them.

  1. Increased adaptability

Due to the speed at which information changes and is received, interoperability allows systems to adapt quickly to continuously changing data. 

  1. Increased productivity and control

Collected data is related to production and it is managed in a way that it is available and accessible by the various users with more ease.

Strategy For Interoperability  

To achieve an effective interoperability strategy, the first step is to analyze the initial situation of the organization. Its systems map, interoperability requirements, business processes, the IT projects with integration requirements are handled. The steps behind managing the company’s Master Data, at which level of standardization its data are, the level of reusability that could be achieved, all these items should be analyzed in depth.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, Interoperability is the ability of organizations to share data and processes between their information systems, with other organizations, and with their users or customers. To put it simply, business interoperability is when a company’s systems communicate and exchange messages understood by all of them, and interoperability is fulfilling its purpose.