Putting Two and Two Together

Fifty percent of an IT budget is a lot of dollars but not an outsizeamount when it comes to integration. Beth Gold-Bernstein, vicepresident of strategic services at Ebizq, an integration informationportal based in White Plains, N.Y., estimates that a large integrationproject will cost between $500,000 and $1 million for software andlicensing, and implementation costs will run twice as high.

But in spite of the cost and difficulty of integration, the vision ofreaping Dell-like benefits ought to make such projects a top corporatepriority, says Bob Parker, vice president of e-commerce strategy atAMR Research in Boston. Yet despite their importance, he says, manyintegration projects fail or get abandoned. Why?

It's tempting (and all too easy) to line up the usual whipping boys oftechnology failure: overhyped software, unresponsive IS staffs,incompetent systems integration firms. But Frances Karamouzis, aresearch director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn., says that theproblems don't lie with technology alone. In fact, she says,"Technology is usually ahead of the curve from the perspective ofintegration." The real culprit, as she sees it, is a failure ofexecutive leadership. In other words, look in the mirror."One reasonmany companies are not well integrated is the amount of changerequired on the business process side, in addition to the technologycomponent," says Karamouzis.

Most business executives mistakenly think of integration as theexclusive province of gearheads: The techies will fix it down in thebowels of the engine room. But true integration also requiressignificant involvement from the business side of a company, andthat's not happening at many places.

"Businesspeople want the magic of what integration is going to do, butthey're almost always unwilling to pay the price in terms of what it'sgoing to cost them in extra work," says Steve Morelli, CFO at StarKistFoods in Pittsburgh.