What's the first thing to do when you need to integrate two systems?

No the answer is not to read the specs of each system and figure out the gap analysis and starting mapping every field... It’s a set of much much more basic questions that an organization and integration engineer needs to ask:

• How will we line up records from two systems so we can refer to the common things in each system? How big is the problem? How could we solve it?

• Who has this knowledge? How can we make it easy to get this knowledge?

• When we get this alignment done how can we get everyone to buy in and keep the alignment?

It’s easier to understand what these questions mean if we drop it down to a concrete problem we had to solve within our company. That was: How can we integrate our accounting system and our sales (customer relationship management) system?