Shift focus from integrating to connecting applications
The digital transformation requires businesses to embrace a new set of technologies and business practises to enable staying in the game. We also need to embrace new strategies for system integration that can meet the new demands that comes with digital transformation.
What is needed is a shift in focus and practise where we move away from traditional integration and instead start to utilize connectivity strategies to achieve data exchange between applications and systems.
"A new approach is required, one that leverages existing investments, and enables IT to seize the moment to drive transformational change; one that enables agility, yet also allows IT to maintain visibility and control. This change is a journey that requires shifting IT’s mindset away from project delivery to delivering assets as services and enabling line of business and IT to self-serve and build their own connections, processes, and applications, while central IT governs access, SLAs, and data quality. In short, IT has to become an enabler for the business."
(API-led connectivity The next step in the evolution of SOA, Mulesoft white paper)
Moving from integration to connectivity requires a new way of thinking regarding integration, instead of offering a complete oftentimes custom built point to point based unique solution for connecting two applications for data exchange.
We instead create a digital backbone that systems can connect to utilizing well known, standardized and homogenous interfaces for connectivity. This means that we shift the responsibility to having applications that can connect from the integration team to the owners of the applications that need to exchange data.
By minimizing the offered technologies for application data exchange to as few as possible, preferably one. And making the available offerings as simple, homogenous and standardized as possible, we can start to offer connectivity instead of integration. Offering connectivity over integration will allow us to achieve the following benefits:
- Safe, robust, user-friendly and standardized Self-service is enabled through only offering a minimized, standardized, simplified and robust set of connectivity alternatives. This means that the competence required to connect systems will be minimal and thereby lead to safe self service in the business.
- Quality of Service, by minimizing the used technology stacks, the integration teams can focus more attention on keeping used platforms robust, as well as focusing on upgrades and modernizing to keep up with the rest of the world.
- Correct ownership, instead of having point to point integrations that are owned by a central (separate) department the outlet for data exchange and discovery is owned directly by the business. This will mean that time to market and execution speed for a data exchange is completely independent of central IT.
- Monetization, the data owner will be able to monetize on data exchange through several different models and have the ability to allow or disallow a consuming party to continue consuming, depending on business terms.
- Homogenized minimal technology stack, will also promote innovation as “all” business information is exposed in the same way with one unified way for both discovery and consumption. This gives the potential for both internal as well as external innovation.
