Integration Modernization, the Secret Sauce To DX Success
- By Paul Mah
- February 22, 2021
As the world becomes increasingly digital, enterprises need to integrate their applications, data, and digital systems for the requisite agility to meet intensifying global competition. But 84% of digital transformation (DX) fail due to siloed data and unreliable integration approaches, according to data from IBM, setting the majority of organizations on their back foot.
Moreover, traditional approaches to DX such as centralized architectures to integration are costly and can’t keep up with escalating demand. The way ahead lies with a modern, agile approach to integration, enabling them to quickly use and deploy integration technologies and realize the benefits of modern cloud platforms for successful DX.
How to drive digital transformation
As noted by Forrester Research, the need to drive new customer experiences mean that organizations must tap into an ever-growing set of applications, processes, and information sources – all which significantly expand the enterprise’s need for and investment in integration capabilities. Seen this way, modernizing integration is fundamental to drive DX.
Many organizations have started to embrace agile application development techniques and agile integration to succeed. Agile integration enables enterprises to break free from heavily centralized integration architectures that cannot support the demand. It increases the pace at which they can build integrations through simplification and automation. Integration then becomes a critical enabler of innovation rather than something that is holding it back.
This new approach spans from people and process to architecture and technology by leveraging modern practices and capabilities including APIs, microservices architecture, cloud-native design, DevOps, event-driven architecture, and container-based infrastructure.
Modernize your integration landscape
How can enterprises modernize their integration landscape to ensure that it doesn’t become an obstacle? The solution lies with a single platform that can meet all integration patterns and capabilities at speed while enabling organizations to balance application development efficiency, meet traditional and modern integration requirements, and lower costs.
To meet the demands of DX and application modernization, agility, scalability, and resilience must be met. This is best done with a container-based, decentralized, and microservices-aligned approach.
The IBM Integration Modernization Field Guide offers a few tips on this front:
- Converge on a common integration platform: Improve availability, resiliency, and maintainability by moving the current enterprise integration capabilities onto a managed container platform and streamline the provisioning of integration services.
- Adopt an agile integration architecture: Review integration architecture and strategy against the need for applications to connect to systems inside and outside the enterprise integration landscape. Promote agility, simplicity, and efficiency.
- Focus on the use case: Accelerate innovation by centering your view of integration on your business use case. Reexamine the services consumption model by both digital channel and enterprise applications
- Enrich integration logic: With cognitive AI capabilities, dynamically augment your integration flow logic and composition using event-driven rules and decision policies.
Where do you stand?
Enterprises are looking to DX as the key to building new personalized and connected experiences across a network of applications that leverages data of all types. Data from new sources need to be injected into business processes to create competitive differentiation and drive new customer experiences.
Yet there is just so much data out there – and distributed widely within and outside the enterprise. This means the speed at which organizations can bring that data together is fundamental to the success of modern innovations.
Image credit: iStockphoto/anyaberkut
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.