In corporate or public organizations, enterprise IT departments are faced with increasingly complex environments that encompass numerous applications, databases and users – from internal and external sources, including many that are directly linked to or overseen by HR departments.

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The Connected Organization

Organizations, and their employees, departments, data, customers/constituents and partners, can no longer function successfully in silos. Everything and everyone needs to be connected, and those connections can’t be an afterthought. The ecosystem within which all these players participate needs to work seamlessly; the usability of the integration needs to be almost invisible to users.

For human capital systems, the benefits of integration are strategic and operational. From a strategic standpoint, ensuring tight integration of internal and external systems and data allows for successful implementation of an organization’s talent management strategy:

• A single source of truth across your HR ecosystem, as integrated platforms are kept up-to-date automatically in real time.
• Workforce planning requires external data for proper modeling and predictive analytics.
• Recruitment requires integration with onboarding and performance data to improve hiring strategies.
• Onboarding systems need data from external systems and either internal or external hiring systems to ensure high-quality onboarding.
• Performance can be improved by analyzing employee performance with hiring, onboarding and learning system activity.
• Learning and development systems integrate with internal and external systems.

From an operational and tactical viewpoint, integrations also provide significant benefits that can reduce costs, improve productivity and enhance organizational performance. These operational benefits include:

• Reduction in operational costs across your organization
• Reduction in manual, error-prone data entry
• Elimination of inefficient, error-prone “double handling” of data
• Automatic notifications and mature error handling procedures
• Faster and more efficient onboarding of new employees and increased employee engagement
• Consistency of data integrity across your HR technology solutions.

High-performing interoperability – seamless integration of systems, data and platforms – is critical for today’s modern infrastructure. Today’s enterprise climate demands secure, easy-to-use and cost-effective integration that accommodates the systems and data you utilize and are key to how your organization operates and delivers on its goals and mission. And because environments change regularly, there are likely to be new systems and new data sources needed that must integrate into your current environment.

The bottom line is that interoperability and integration is a strategic organizational priority as well as a critical business challenge for IT. Never losing sight of those intertwined imperatives will serve your organization well and ensure an environment that is understanding of and accommodating of the myriad of integrations that make up your HR ecosystem.

Cloud-based Integration

A modern framework that addresses these challenges and realities should ensure seamless integration between human capital, payroll and financial management systems, regardless of the directional flow of data. In addition, organizations need to utilize systems of their choice and that the user community embraces. This means interoperability must provide a simple user experience throughout the ecosystem.

There are options to deliver this integration and ease the burden for IT departments, while serving an organization’s human capital requirements. These options should be at the heart of any framework and include:

• Open, standards-based web services APIs. Secure, open APIs that provide full import and export data flow to and from all functional areas of the organization’s integrated talent management system with any external 3rd-party system.
• Cloud platform. The cloud platform should include an API engine to accompany APIs, as well as secure monitoring and management tools to meet your organization’s needs and ensure an efficient and high level of performance. Integrations should be accomplished through different transfer methods, according to the level of resources available from your organization. The encapsulation of these cloud components enables your organization, customers and partners to build and deploy seamless integrations.
• Pre-packaged integrations. Pre-packaged integrations that connect the cloud platform to external systems via translating and syncing capabilities can be a cost-effective option for your organization’s integrations. These integrations help orchestrate and administer interoperability between your talent management system and other systems.

The completely integrated HR ecosystem is within reach. To learn more, check out our white paper.

Download our Simpler Enterprise Interoperability white paper.