Configuration vs Integration By John Ekers Dec. 18, 2018
Some time ago, when bottling the good red wines with a screw cap instead of a cork became more common, I asked my friend Jacques which was better. Jacques, a true Frenchman and a wine connoisseur, confessed he didn’t know. But he did share that it’s an argument for the ages and certainly there were already numerous doctorate thesis published that forcefully claim one approach over the other. Along a similar theme, there lacks consensus regarding configurations vs integrations for product and system development.
Configuration is defined as the relative arrangement of elements within a system. Integration is defined as an act of combining into a whole. Simply put, the configuration has everything included, but needs to be set or “configured”. The integration has parts missing that will be combined to create the end system. Or even more simply, configuration can be done by an operator and integration requires a programmer.
I tend to like a combinational approach. You need to have both configurable options along with program integration options. Beyond the obvious argument that not every customer requirement can be accomplished with configurations, I think this should be an implementation requirement and expectation. Why? I have a friend using wordpress templates for her website. Lots of configurable options and templates to choose from. However, when her business needed to do something a bit different, she was told no. The system wouldn’t support the change.
The point here is that a configurable product can potentially work out of the box to satisfy existing needs. But as the needs change, it’s likely the configurable product will no longer satisfy the future requirements and you need an integration.
Fortunately, this is exactly what today’s cloud services are providing. It’s the perfect combination of CONFIGURATION and INTEGRATION… CONFIG-RATION. Today’s cloud services include all of the sub components necessary to create highly scalable and secure business services for both mobile and browser-based applications. And the good news is that most of them are already wired to work together. As an example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is providing identity, storage, streaming and mobile modules that can readily support a variety of applications. Policies can be quickly created to extend across existing and new services. Created applications are leveraging the underlying cloud services and security infrastructure. As the markets and technologies evolve, new services can be adopted with minimal integration effort. For your business, this means that you can have a working solution for today and have confidence that – no matter the market / technology change – you will be ready for tomorrow.
Are your business services cloud based? Are you ready for tomorrow? Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you.