From the IT perspective, what are the goals of business integration?

Foremost, and unfortunately not many IT departments do this, I believe IT needs to recognize that their customers are the employees of their company (and of course, the company's customers are too). Everything that IT does needs to reflect this overriding concept.

Keeping this in mind, I believe the goals of business integration should be to improve "things" for the employees of the company. Whether that is to make systems easier to use, less problematic or just more integrated depends on the audience and the company (and it could be all of the above). Integration just for integrations sake is not enough.

Now fitting within your question, IT can have goals that are separate or outside of the needs of their "customers", as long as they are complimentary (or at least not detrimental). IT goals of integration should focus on tangible IT activities: reducing cost, improving performance, reducing trouble tickets, reducing support requirements, getting off old systems, etc. With goals based on these, you can easily establish baselines from which to measure the improvement gained from integration.

All business integration goals should always be the same:

Reducing costs, improving work-flow, maximizing profitability

Now, good luck accomplishing that.

A large retailer I worked at had this really bad habit of not discussing anything with the CIO. Department heads would buy a product only focusing on how it was going to impact their department, or bottom line, not the greater organization. Then the CIO would get called in to make it talk to this other application. Wheels would have to be re-invented, square pegs would get ramrodded into round holes, and the overall experience was painful at best.

As an IT department, you should go out of your way to better educate yourself on the needs of each department and what you can do to improve the business functions from a technology standpoint. Work-flow is key, and to see if it really works you will have to measure the performance before and and after. These systems should also be seamlessly integrated with the least human intervention as possible -- and most of the time best used as a SaaS. Users are their own worst enemy, but they don't even realize. It's the job of IT to walk the tight rope of balancing functionality with no interruptions, seamless work-flow, and reducing costs.

When I say reduce costs, it doesn't have to be within the IT department. What if integrating your purchasing and inventory systems to digital faxing in real-time eliminates 25 jobs? That reduced costs, and improved work-flows -- both of which maximize profitability.

A simple reduction of costs, and improving work-flows could be LDAP integration into everything. There is absolutely no excuse for not integrating your LDAP into everything. Employees should not have to type 400 passwords -- that's how they get written down on post notes and stuck to monitors. Don't think it would cut costs? Calculate the amount of time the average user spends logging into systems, see how its impacting their workflow, calculate the money lost.

IT Managers focus on hardware and providing employees with a service -- they need to better educate themselves on the business. They need to go out of their way to help the business grow -- not be focused on streamlining the process for themselves.

Just this morning I was in a meeting and we were discussing migrating a user from one platform to another. The reason: cheaper to buy the other platform. The question isn't can it be done, the question is how does it impact the performance of their workflow. If it prevents a user from helping 5 customers, or processing 5 orders, it could be a costly workflow change.

Switching platforms has endless business integration resources to the disposal of the IT department not already available -- but it might not make sense for the business.

That's why business integration from an IT standpoint should be literally integrating itself in the business, how it impacts it, how it can improve it, all the time enhancing user experience and cutting costs.

Like I said, good luck

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