Most of the major organizations doing business are made up of several individual silos. These include finance, accounts, sales, IT, corporate services and a few other divisions. More often than not the information spread across these divisions is not consistent and each of the divisions does not have the right visibility into the other functionality. For a project that involves more than one division, it then becomes an uphill task to collaborate. This is where ICC or Integration Competency Center comes into picture.

The ICC as the name suggests is one central focal point that will collate information, make the data streamlines after assessing its quality and then maintain the data standard across the other divisions. The core competency of this group is to spread and leverage the functional knowledge associated with every division amongst other groups.

Over a period of time this ensures that the individual divisions are not isolated silos rather units that can work in collaboration with each other. By governing the individual knowledge of the divisions and expertise, the ICC basically aims to cut costs on cross divisional projects by constantly improving the information system.

The integration competency center, as one of its main costs, aims to lower the budget spent by an organization on technology by proposing ownership of functionality across various divisions and thus making each of the divisions a stakeholder in a common project. Eventually, this will lead to quicker turnaround and optimization of resources along with better return on investments. The business rules laid down at the lowest level are revisited and rebuilt keeping the bigger picture in mind which is to bring in information and spread knowledge as a mutual exchange.

More than anything else, integration competency aims to integrate silo functions of an organization and help them streamline their efforts. Once this is done, the effort can be used as a platform for future projects instead of relaying the bricks all the time, which happened usually because of poor information and inconsistency in the way knowledge was passed around various functional groups.

The greater leverage of business experience also ensures that the decision to use certain tools over others is taken at a higher level after consideration of all divisions. This would also lead to less duplication of effort and re-usability of basic building blocks within the organization cutting down massively on costs and achieving better efficiency over a period of time and more importantly greater consistency in the way data is perceived.