Data flow and application integration are two of the biggest challenges enterprises face in the digital age. With more applications comes more data, and integrating these legacy systems requires significant technical expertise.
Higher education is no stranger to these challenges either. The need to integrate essential systems like student management systems, accounting, and human resources has strained higher education—highlighting why integration isn’t just nice-to-have, it’s a must-have today.
So, why is higher education turning to integration as a service to overcome connectivity and compatibility issues with their existing systems? And why should you see integration as the new ERP?
ERP solutions provide an organisation with a robust system for streamlining the flow of data into a centralised location. But these systems often fall short due to their inflexibility, slow development cycle, and inability to keep up with rapid change.
Large-scale change is a difficult task for any large organisation. Making significant changes to your infrastructure, the applications you rely on to power your processes—it’s a big ask. Replacing these systems is disruptive to the organisation, expensive, and time-consuming.
Add to that the complexity of building out new ERP integrations and functionality, and it’s clear why companies are shifting to the more agile approach offered by integration as a service.
Integration as a service solves these challenges by integrating your existing systems without needing to overhaul the entire system. This provides large organisations with an agile solution that can even accelerate your transition to the cloud.
Integration offers a lot of benefits to any organisation. Here are some of the biggest ones we feel you should be aware of:
If integration is such a big issue, where does opportunity exist? And what can you expect to achieve with an optimised integration system?
Ability to scale and adapt fast to new trends. Integration gives higher education a flexible solution that can adapt to changing student needs. Whether that’s new course requirements, regulatory changes, or the need for new functionality—tying this all together across multiple vendors and platforms is made easy with an integrated experience.
Achieve business outcomes without blowing it all up. Every organisation feels the need to find that perfect solution—something that can do it all. It may seem better to use a single application for the majority of these processes, but that isn’t always the case. This all-or-nothing approach often leads to compromise and could even diminish the user experience.
Increase productivity across the organisation. Eliminating manual processes should be the goal of any organisation. Integration as a service keeps data flowing, eliminates duplication, centralises information, and reduces your reliance on manual processes—enhancing productivity across the organisation. When your teams know where to look for critical data, that’s less time wasted searching and validating.
Improve the real-time flow of data between systems. The power of integration is its ability to enable bidirectional real-time data flow between essential business applications. By upgrading these systems, you can read and write data in all directions, significantly expanding usability across the board.
Better visibility into the processes that matter. Working with multiple systems often means trying to analyse important data in siloed environments. But without context, this data can quickly become confusing and impact decision-making. Integration ensures that important data is aggregated and available in a centralised location, so your teams can make rapid decisions based on all relevant data.
Designed for growth and scalability. Data management requirements are only going to continue to grow. If an existing system is already struggling to cope with these requirements, integration can provide a stable outlet to offload pressure from your other systems. This gives you a powerful solution that can extend previous IT investments as you plan for the long-term.
Offload the burden of support to your integrator. Supporting various systems and integrations is costly. Whether you have internal ownership over this process, or rely on vendors, integration as a service lets you offload support to a single source. This will free up your IT teams and support staff to focus on other critical areas.
This list isn’t exhaustive by any means. Some education institutions may prefer to stick with a traditional ERP system.
The key takeaway is how integration gives higher education a best-in-class student information system that offers the functionality, usability, and compatibility needed to create a unified experience.
Not sure where to start when it comes to integration? Education institutions across the United Kingdom rely on Amos | Connect to create an integrated experience.
Our team of skilled professionals has decades of proven experience working with higher education and tech, so we know what it takes to integrate legacy systems.
If you’re looking for a scalable, modernised, and cost-effective solution that can enhance your IT infrastructure—we can help. Get in touch with one of our integration specialists today to learn more.
