The Lantern Line
Systems that cannot see each other cannot help each other. This is the cold half of the work — the signal between the parts, and knowing what that signal is doing when it stops.
The problem this solves
Every company past a certain size runs several systems that were each chosen sensibly and never chosen together. Finance has one. Operations has another. Sales has a third, and a spreadsheet.
The gaps between them get filled by people. Someone exports, someone reformats, someone re-keys. It works, it is invisible in any budget, and it is one resignation away from breaking.
What integration work involves
- Deciding what is true
- Before anything is connected: which system owns which fact. Two systems that both believe they own the customer record will diverge, and no amount of syncing fixes an ownership question.
- Moving the data
- APIs where they exist, scheduled transfer where they do not, and honest handling of the systems that offer neither.
- Failing loudly
- The point of failure is not that something broke. It is that something broke quietly in March and nobody noticed until the quarterly numbers did not reconcile.
- Observability
- Being able to answer where a specific record is, what happened to it, and when — without anyone opening a database.
On replacing versus connecting
Often the right answer is not to integrate at all. Two systems doing half a job each, held together by a nightly transfer, may be more expensive than one system doing the whole job.
That is a judgement about your business rather than a technical preference, and it is one of the things the survey exists to answer before anyone commits either way.