Integration

Integration is the act of making whole (in full), completing, making whole. It is used more in a metaphorical sense of putting parts together to form a cohesive whole, that is: integrated. If your question is just this: – What is integration? – the answer is given as you would find it in a dictionary. But of course the sense of integration you are looking for must be more specific.  Integration: What Is It Exactly? The general context, the background, we have already explained in the previous paragraphs. But the word integration is mainly used in the organizational structure of a company, in 3 very particular situations:  Integration of (new) employees Team integration Systems and application integration It is these 3 subjects that we are going to talk about next. Learn more: #03 Café com a Pluga: Iugu Integration + RD Station  What Is New Employee On Boarding? This one is easy and equally important. Large corporations, or companies of any size that care about their internal culture and knowledge management, when they admit a new employee, usually make him or her go through the so-called integration process , with the aim of making him feel at ease, know the people, rules, customs and other procedures in the company. There are even integration manuals , lectures, videos and other events or integration tools that help a lot in this, leading the new employee to become productive and achieve high performance in the company’s tasks much sooner than if they were left to fend for themselves. Of course, for a new employee to assimilate the organizational culture of a company is not an easy task. If you’ve seen the movie The Intern, “The Internship”, you know what I’m talking about.  Achieving team integration Integration: what is it when we refer to teams? A bit obvious: getting everyone to work together in a collaborative and more productive way. But how? In addition, of course, to a clear definition of the roles and workloads of each one in the teams, and a competent leader , some applications can be extremely powerful in this process, and we can mention some of them: Slack , for example, is a tool developed to make communication between teams much more agile and intuitive, through conversations that you can organize and divide into channels to follow specific projects , receive notificationsand use as your primary real-time communicator, decreasing the amount of emails and other types of messages. CRM tools such as Pipedrive , Agendor and SalesForce help to integrate not only sales teams, but also to provide data and information to strategic planning, marketing, product development teams, etc. and provide reliable and up-to-date support for decision-making. What company doesn’t use spreadsheets? With Google Sheets it is possible to share the creation, visualization and editing of spreadsheets, making communication much more agile, updated in real time and accessible remotely. And the best: it’s free! Trello _is a tool specifically created to manage projects and integrate teams . It uses a visual metaphor in which you organize teams into boards and these are divided into task lists , which are represented by cards . What is application integration? You may have noticed that the concept of cloud computing is totally related to the aforementioned applications. And if these tools are in the cloud, it is possible to integrate them and make them “work together”, as long as they have their APIs (protocols for communication between applications based on a website) open. Check out: What is API and how does it increase productivity in companies So a status change from a “lead” to “customer” in your CRM software can automatically include a notice in Slack, or add a row in a spreadsheet and until firing an email into your email marketing tool. And is it difficult to develop these API integrations ?Yes, hard as hell (even for multidisciplinary teams, which have someone from web development)! But calm down: there are ready-made applications, developed by companies like Pluga, in which you can integrate apps in less than 2 minutes, without knowing anything about programming!