Enterprise Integration

Our Enterprise Integration practice designs, builds, implements, and supports enterprise IT architectures. To keep up with the fast pace of business and escalating customer demands, it business solutions & outsourcing companies must have the ability to respond quickly to change. However, doing so requires an enterprise architecture that allows information to flow seamlessly between departments and across geographies. That's easier said than done in most companies, where information "silos" caused by legacy applications and a diverse IT architecture prevent smooth information flow.

We, at Senate® integrate data, processes, and applications to deliver fully functional solutions tailored to your business needs. Our best-of-breed tools, methods, best practices, and skilled resources in enterprise architecture, enterprise information management, and process integration can transform your raw data into actionable business information. Senate®'s Enterprise Integration practice provides a structured information processing and delivery framework. This practice has helped leading global organizations break down information barriers across the enterprise. Our comprehensive suite of Enterprise Integration services delivers an end-to-end solution that addresses the four critical elements of business operations: business, people, process and IT.

Our Enterprise Application Integration solutions are designed to deliver measurable results and rapid ROI, and strike the right balance between business and IT needs. Using an end-to-end approach that customizes our Enterprise Integration solutions, we have helped many companies build integrated business practices that span organizations, people, systems and applications. The methodology makes it easy to propagate standard business procedures and information across an organization's value chain. This leverages the value of Enterprise Integration investments.
Senate® has a wide range of capabilities and services to meet your current and future enterprise integration needs, such as:

• Enterprise Architecture: The description of the current and/or future structure and behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, aligned with the organization’s core goals and strategic direction.
• Process Integration: The set of broad spectrum processes that govern the organization, integrated systems, and architecture that comprise business systems as well as IT projects.
• Enterprise Information Management (EIM): The broad spectrum of technologies and best practices encompassing business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration.

Enterprise application integration projects can be extremely challenging. We have established an impressive track record of delivering proven integration and e-business services. Our integration technology expertise includes middleware products, applications and tools, and is complemented by in-depth knowledge of ERP, SCM, CRM, SRM, data warehousing and e-commerce.

Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is at the heart of any enterprise strategy. It provides the supporting systems to further business strategy. To fully use current and future technology, your enterprise architecture must be stable, consistent, accessible, and aligned to the business.

Senate®’s team of expert’s designs best practices-based, service-oriented, component-based architectures that can be reused across multiple business processes and applications. This allows for flexibility and adaptability to market dynamics, and enables more efficient replacement and integration of application components.

We work with you to ensure that your enterprise architecture and developed applications satisfy business needs. An architecture or integration solution that doesn’t incorporate your key data, applications and business processes isn’t really a solution.

Process Integration
Process integration capabilities, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), are not a technology. They are a method of conceptualizing, designing, and implementing business software applications and infrastructure. Process integration incorporates: centralized and disciplined enforcement of industry standards, assembly of reusable autonomous business functions (also called “services”), and loosely coupled connections between services.
Process integration capabilities, including SOA, benefit your business by:

• Extending the functionality and life of existing IT assets
• Reducing architectural complexity
• Decreasing duplication of services and data
• Increasing business flexibility and agility in responding to market changes

But process integration also places important demands on the enterprise to adjust organizationally, behaviorally, and culturally.
Senate® has developed a comprehensive methodology and toolset based on industry best practices and our experience. This is done to ensure that SOA is effectively developed and deployed in close coordination with the business imperatives that drive your enterprise.
Process integration lets you mold IT around the needs of the business, instead of molding the business around the needs of IT.

Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

EIM is not a technology or a product. It is a continuous process for organizing, structuring, and managing your organization’s information assets, independent of technology platform or organizational structure.

EIM’s objective is to integrate business goals with technology. With this, you can manage data to simplify business processes, increase productivity, and enhance adaptability.
There are many components or initiatives you can implement to achieve EIM, including business intelligence, data warehousing, data governance, and data integration activities. An integral piece of a successful EIM process is business intelligence (BI).

Business Intelligence: Transforming Raw Data into Actionable Business Information
“Business intelligence” refers to a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, accessing, and analyzing data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.
A business intelligence initiative can help your organization create an infrastructure. This infrastructure can transform raw data into useful business information, so you can monitor the marketplace and measure company performance.

For instance, a BI initiative often takes the shape of just-in-time reporting, web-based portals, or executive dashboards. These all provide secure access for authorized individuals to view a wealth of information, both visually and according to specification.

Business Intelligence systems combined with enterprise information management initiatives can help in transformation. The transformation takes place from your operational system data into an analytical system data structure that supports your business needs. This structure enables business executives to obtain a historical view of operational data, thus reducing the burden on your IT resources. It enables executives to make proactive decisions instead of reactive ones.

How Can Senate® Help Your Organization?
Senate® offers clients the following services.

Discovery
The discovery is a short-term, yet high-impact initiative to capture your organization’s current state of affairs. Starting with a one- or two-day visit to your site, we obtain a “snapshot” of your organization’s current IT position. This is done by collecting and analyzing system-level documentation, business objectives, and vision and mission statements.
We interview key individuals and conduct group analysis to identify your business drivers and IT requirements. We strive to understand how the system currently meets or misses business needs based on our experience and industry examples.

We then go off-site to analyze the data, meeting with you again approximately two weeks later. We provide recommendations on how you can bridge the gap between current and desired IT states.

Assessment/Roadmap
An assessment requires more rigorous information gathering than a discovery session. It also offers more comprehensive analysis of your organization and enterprise architecture as a result.
We interview key IT and business stakeholders, review documentation, and conduct group analysis sessions. We then identify your business drivers and IT requirements. We strive to understand how your current system meets or misses your current and future business objectives.
We assess the current state and help develop the future state of your enterprise integration architecture. We then compare the current state to industry examples for information management. From that we prepare a gap analysis, which identifies high-level critical requirements and priorities. This determines the best way to move from the current state to a tactical and strategic future state.
Senate® can evaluate and recommend technology and its components, assist with return-on-investment (ROI) calculations. Senate® can also contribute to building a business case to present to executive management or the board of directors.
The end result is an overall strategic enterprise “roadmap” that describes the scope of the effort, identifies discrete tasks and projects to undertake. It also denotes timelines and deliverables to incrementally implement an enterprise integration program.

Development
Experts from our Global Enterprise Integration Practice and our local branch office take the results of the roadmap. They then work with you to design, build, and launch your enterprise integration initiative using our proven methodologies. This involves the collaboration of Senate®’s technology, people, and processes with yours in a continuous initiative of process improvement.
Our proven, disciplined business process management enables us to achieve project goals on time and on budget, allowing us to focus on driving costs and delays out of the process, so we can drive quality into it. We’ll work with an eye toward measurable business results: cost containment, faster time-to-market, and minimized risk.

Support
Senate® views every client engagement as a relationship, not a transaction. We work with you to ensure that your system performs as expected, providing knowledge transfer to your team members. This is done to address issues as they arise. By nurturing independence while promoting project success, we offer you a smooth transition to the new system, yet we’re available whenever you need our assistance.

Trust Your Business Data with Senate®, the Business-Focused Consultants
We utilize a proven approach that is cost-effective and produces highly scalable and repeatable solutions. We overcome risks and hurdles with targeted planning, unique solutions, and highly skilled and respected resources.

Why Senate®?
Senate® has the global resources of an international firm, while offering the local accountability and relationship management of a local partnership. We provide technical, business, and industry expertise, but remain technology-agnostic. At the same time, we maintain strong partnerships with leading technology companies, such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft. We are current on their technological developments and have colleagues to partner with when a challenge necessitates it.