The right integrations are essential if you wish to utilize the full potential of your data throughout your organization. They eliminate the need for entering data into several different systems and completing workflows manually. But getting them right means focusing on function rather than the system itself.
Veeva reaches far and wide into your business and, in order for it to run smoothly, you need to be in control of the data flow. Without proper integrations, both internally in Veeva and between Veeva and other applications, your data will not find its way to the right place at the right time.
Add to that the implications of Veeva’s frequent updates and releases and their impact on your integrations. As a multi-tenant cloud service, Veeva releases updates three times per year, some of which are mandatory, while others are optional. These frequent changes add to the complexity of keeping your integrations optimized.
Design your integrations to fit the function
Overall, it is imperative to get a detailed view of processes and the needs of the business rather than focusing on program specific needs. In an ever-changing landscape of systems, the true benefit of the right integrations is their stability. As opposed to earlier where data was displayed generically, the new best practice is to build the integrations to fit the specific business function. By designing integrations according to a specific function, it becomes easier not only for the users to complete their tasks, but also to control access management, traceability, and rights management.
Furthermore, integrations play an important part in your work with automation. The right integrations support machine-to-machine interaction, which opens up new possibilities within IoT. This has the potential to significantly increase your efficiency, effectively bypassing the need for human interaction. But it makes flawless integrations even more important, as a single malfunction could bring your entire automated process to a halt.
Data lakes minimize the need for integrations
We see a trend towards businesses consolidating their data into data platforms such as data lakes. The general aim is to gather data from across systems and applications in order to conduct various analyses and use machine learning to derive knowledge. The benefit of gathering data and creating data lakes is that data becomes available in a central place, which eliminates the need for many of the point-to-point integrations you would otherwise need to contextualize data. This in turn also lowers the number of dependencies between systems and applications, which in turn reduces the validation effort needed.
Your various applications will continuously make requests for updates. And these updates need to be monitored so that you can react if and when needed. Therefore, Veeva provides Spark Messaging – a system for event message queues. It is a powerful tool that opens up a whole host of new opportunities when designing applications. One example is the ability to create notifications, which will alert you in the case of interesting events occurring in your systems and applications. This way your systems can automatically communicate when important business events occur, and stay up to date without having specialists spending time on monitoring everything manually.
