Trust me it’s true. Print up some new business cards. You’re already a systems integrator.

When you think “systems integrator” you might imagine a techie, but look in the mirror. If you’re a techie your imagination got it right.

Life is a loose organization of people, information, and things zipping in and out of, and around us. You’re a systems integrator because everything is part of some system and you have already woven a system specific to you, by integrating parts of disparate systems.

So why don’t we always see everything as a system since everything is part of one? The likely answer is if we did, we’d go mad. Seeing too much at one time, or having too many possibilities at one time can be paralyzing. If you’ve ever felt the frustration of having too many choices, you know how this can go.

We have to be able to chunk the systems into finite and chewable segments for us to understand and interact with. We also have to chose the scope at which we chunk to match the context of what we need to achieve.

If I need to drive to meet a friend, I won’t set the zoom on my navigation to show me the whole earth. It’s pointless and doesn’t help me at all. I need to be able to deal with the right scope of information to accomplish the goal of driving to meet my friend.

In software this is even more critical because you are largely choosing scope for other people. The most useless piece of software in the world does absolutely nothing, the second most useless does absolutely everything. If your scope is wrong, so is the solution.

These days a good piece of software does what I need it to do, it takes little effort for me to learn, and is easy for me to integrate into my life. Good developers understand this, and as a result, I have a bunch of the system that is my life (which includes work) chunked into different applications. If the developers are really good, they help my own integration efforts by understanding ahead of time the integrations I’m going to need/want in future, and make it easy for me.

The first way is quite literal, the software has integration capabilities with other software that is likely to be a useful part of the system you’re trying to build. The second way is less obvious, but just as important. Building for a mobile or tablet is and should be treated as a form of integration, not as a “platform choice” or delivery channel.

You can usually tell when developers don’t understand this, the software will be much less useful, and may even be a desktop application ported to mobile. As we have a wider variety of devices, developers are going to have to remember how to scope and then integrate their solutions out into the individual systems we’re all building for ourselves. As users we all need to carefully pick and choose which systems we want to integrate, and scope our integration efforts to meet our actual goals.