An average construction company runs five to fifteen systems. Each choice is defensible on its own. The problem appears at the seams between them.
Decide data ownership first
The most important decision in any integration project is about master data, not technology. For every object — project, contact, article, employee — it must be clear which system is the source and which only read.
What makes an integration production-grade
- Idempotency: processing a message twice must not create duplicates.
- Error handling with a queue so failed messages are retried.
- Full logging of what was sent, received and rejected.
- Monitoring and alerting instead of hearing about outages from your accountant.
- Interface versioning so a vendor update does not break production.
- Documentation and a clear support agreement.