Communication is everything. The moment we’re born, the labyrinth of neurons in our brain starts processing and distributing information. Strong neural connections help our brains to expand their function so we can make smart decisions and reach our potential. Our well being relies on quick, efficient messaging. If the right connections aren’t made early on, our brains miss vital input that would otherwise instruct or protect us.

Business software integrations are similar, except a well-conceived integration delivers information with efficiency and consistency that vastly exceeds human potential. Integration makes it possible to tap into the tangle of business processes to get information wherever it resides and make it useful wherever it’s needed. If the diverse software applications you use don’t connect at logical points, you miss opportunities for efficiency that enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software allow.

If you’ve read the first article in this series, you know that data is the basis of any ECM implementation, helping to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. The number of integration points and their thoroughness determine how easily and effectively your information can be pushed and pulled enterprise-wide. Thorough integration assures that data is available wherever and whenever it’s needed. It helps to drive processes forward based on real-time information, dramatically increasing accurate messaging and efficiency.

If you’re not connecting your business systems, you’re not engaging in effective ECM or BPM. Simply said, without thorough integration, you’ve missed the point.

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A List Apart: Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

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Our new book, Empowered, is free on Kindle through September 10th. That means anybody with a Kindle or Kindle reader (iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, PC, or Mac) can download and read it for free forever.

My coauthor Josh Bernoff explains why we're not crazy to do this. It boils down to: We hope you read it and share your thoughts and your own HERO experiences with friends and colleagues. For my part, I'd be thrilled to hear directly back from you or read about your own HERO experiences in comments or posts or tweets or video narratives. Here's Josh's post:

Starting today and continuing until this Friday September 10, you can download Empowered to your Kindle at no charge.

You want to know how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, don't you? If you've got a Kindle, what's stopping you?

Now to the other question. Are we crazy?

Some people have told me that giving away Empowered on Kindle makes it seem worthless. Or that I'm giving up revenue.

But I'm gambling on a different outcome.

"Think of information as something that is created in your head, by cognitive processes in your brain, when you consume content. By content I mean a message that is encoded as text, images, sound etc. To be able to interpret and understand what the content (the message) is about, you must already know a lot about the concepts that it refers to. If you don't, then the content will mean little or nothing to you. You will make no sense out of it."

"Information is the result of a successful communication process. Technically speaking, a message has been sent from a sender to a receiver who has interpreted it successfully. A communication process can also transmit experiences (compare a time table vs an artwork). It can of course transmit both information and an experience."

"There are often logical inconsistencies between key concepts such as data, content, information and knowledge, which cause confusion and complicate discussions and analysis. It often helps to go back to basic definitions and to try to sort them out.

• Data: Data is content that has been structured so hard (in order to be stored and accessed in an efficient way) that it does not provide enough context to the user to be usable on its own. It needs to be aggregated, formatted and described to be usable. 

• Content: Content is something that is indented to communicate a message from a sender to one or several receivers e.g. a diagram, a document or a digital asset such as picture or movie. The purpose of the message (e.g. the communication process) can be to inform the receiver about something or to create an experience. Digitized content is formatted and described in a way that it can easily be managed and delivered to the user with information technology. 

• Experience: The receiver (user) always gets some kind of experience when he/she interacts with digital content via some kind of device and software user interface. The sender might see the experience as a means to communicate the message to the user more efficiently, or the experience might be the actual message. 

• Information: When perceiving and interpreting content that is intended to inform the user about something, the user will hopefully understand the message. In other words, the content is transformed into meaningful information by cognitive processes in the user's head. 

• Knowledge: When the user reflects and applies the information, it can be transformed into knowledge."

"Acknowledging that information and knowledge cannot be managed with technology is important. The main reason is that it allows us to put our focus and efforts on what we actually can manage with technology; how knowledge and information is encoded into various forms of content and how that content is then managed and delivered to the right user in an efficient way"