Faced with mounting global competition, companies are having to improve how they coordinate activity across the company in order to maximise the value they deliver to customers and minimise costs. In turn, this is requiring them to integrate previously discrete departmental information systems in order to enable such collaborative working.

The following paper begins by examining the strategic drivers that are forcing companies to reconsider how they manage their activities and the implications this has for the design of their information systems.

It then considers each of the options a company has for sharing information across the enterprise to enable more collaborative working including separately entering data into multiple applications, linking existing departmental systems together and implementing a single integrated suite of applications across the business.

It then concludes that the appropriate choice for a company will generally depend on its particular situation but that simply having staff key the same data into multiple systems is a very ill-advised means of providing critical management intelligence.