If we accept that the customer experience is the decisive differentiator in our commoditized world, then we need to move rapidly to an integrated business technology landscape and away from point solutions and isolated systems.

Today the typical enterprise IT world is a melange of loosely linked, unplanned, customized technologies, operations and interfaces that have grown and adapted over time.

Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly.

This heterogeneous environment isn’t up to enabling a friction-free, flow of customer experience in a world where the distinctions between consumer and enterprise environments are melting away.

The consumer world is already inter-connected, but at work those same consumers typically cannot collaborate efficiently because sharing is not native to established IT systems, therefore it is absent from most enterprise workflows in traditional IT and business areas, where transactions and databases rule, where processes and the “money apps” (e.g., accounting and finance) have been kept separate because solutions and systems are kept separate.

Today, however, you need a synchronised customer-facing front end, embracing sales, marketing and service automation and eBusiness, which connects with the transactional back office, and enables genuine engagement and bi-directional conversations amidst a sea of unstructured data.

Your brand must be consistently experienced over multiple devices and in multiple contexts using an integrated framework that ties together cloud and on-premise tools.

If your organisation doesn’t have a strategy for bringing together people, processes and data across lines of business then it should get one in a hurry.

After all, disconnected point solutions are pointless.