News overview

Professional services firms generally make use of a wide variety of applications to service their clients in a modern way. More often than not, these applications aren't integrated. With duplicate data entry and avoidable process steps as a result. There is a better way, that saves time, money and increases billable hours!

In our experience it usually takes sharing a few good use cases, in order for others (that don’t focus on integrations every day) to realise how powerful the solution of integrations is. It has the power to solve many common business problems. Most of the time, we try to share use cases in the specific domain the person we are meeting with is in. This assists in identification with/of problem areas. Today, we try a different approach by going across domains, writing about some of our clients that you might least expect!

What comes after the internet? With big players such as Facebook and Epic games betting on the Metaverse, and even changing their name to reflect its importance, we thought we should explore this possible future trend from the angle of integrations. Fear not if you are still at the "meta-whut?" level - our learning curve was steep as well.

So why would you bother with integrations? What's in it for you? In this blog post, we discuss the WHY of integrations at a practical level. Integrations certainly fall into the category of having the potential to alleviate big customer problems and create huge value. However, as with anything, it can be hard to know where to start, if you don’t think about integrations all day, like we do.

We know you are expected to foster employee engagement and experience, collaboration, knowledge banks and if at all possible, boost productivity - all in a day’s work, across many different channels. Remote working in the COVID era has not made your job easier. Find some ideas around how you can increase the time you spend on value-add activities like engagement, in this blog.

In this day and age, if you just let data find its own way in your organisation, you are asking for trouble. Master Data Management (or MDM) is meant to ensure uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of and for data (Wikipedia, paraphrased). The exponential growth of data in general means that MDM is no longer solely something to be worried about at the Enterprise level. All organisations, small and medium included, should have some idea of how they manage their data, which data is most important to them (and conversely most valuable to malicious actors), and which data is regulated and needs extra care. We explain how we have seen that integrations can assist with MDM.

Since its inception, Harmonizer's usability has grown exponentially, both in terms of the number of applications Harmonizer is able to connect with, the use cases the integrations can solve, and the improved ways of "liquifying data" between them. This enriches application functionality in ways that wouldn't have been possible without the integration. Sometimes 1+1 can truly be 3.

We know and understand that you care for your employees and their data. In recent years, there has been a lot of concern for data privacy and security, and for good reasons. HR Managers and other custodians of this information want to do their job as well as possible, keeping the information private and secure. In theory, technological solutions can be of great assistance when it comes to data privacy and security, but how do you make sure this works in practice?

As with any start-up, we are often asked about our ‘Founder Story’. And there are lots of famous and super interesting founder stories out there. Yet we weren’t born with the idea and /or had no cool Eureka! moment regarding cloud integrations, whilst growing up. Not even in our late twenties. However, in our case, we believe that’s not where the magic is. And even though our story might be less glossy - we are very passionate about what we do!

In an ideal world, all applications would talk to each other and be able to exchange data freely (provided this is all secure). In this blog post, we hope to bring some inspiration by sharing insights as to how secure integrations can go hand-in-hand with solving other important business problems, such as Identity and Access Management (IdAM).