Today you no longer work with one software to manage your company. You do this with a collection of all kinds of "blocks" and systems. It is quite a challenge to let them talk efficiently to each other. You obviously want to avoid the need for many manual steps to transfer data from one system to another.
Today there are four ways to connect these blocks.
- Choose blocks that already talk to each other out of the box; this is the most convenient and cheapest. Unfortunately, this is not always available or the integrations are not always powerful enough to do what you want.
- Connect the blocks using a simple workflow intermediate layer. The most famous in this category is Zapier
- Using iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) and API-management, these powerful platforms allow to automate in-depth data integrations with little or no software development
- Custom development - a programmer who will connect the systems from scratch. This is often a costly and complex task. Very important here is that the integrations must be often updateable / updated; this takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money and slows down the company. You then get a large black box that is difficult to maintain and therefore not very transparent.
It is also very important to look at a central platform for managing the identity and access of the users. Of course you want to avoid that each software requires a separate password; which you all have to activate and manage separately. These platforms bear the name Identity Providers (IdP).
In the overview you will find a feed view of the most commonly used tools.
