I recently moderated a discussion with three of my colleagues, Co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Bernardinelli; Peter Kreslins, Co-founder and CTO; and Tam Ayers, Field CTO, North America. It was a fascinating session where we shrugged off the constraints of today to explore what we believe we’ll experience in 2023. Since we tend to focus on our customers, it’s easy to forget that Digibee is an enterprise too. So the future IT industry trends we predict in 2023 are ones we will share with all enterprises. Read on!
Everything is connected.The past three years have only served to demonstrate just how accurate that statement is. The changes businesses rushed to implement amid pandemic restrictions did not evaporate as life returned to normal, and the effects of crises here at home and around the world serve as a continual reminder of just how connected we all are.
Digital transformation has emerged as a top priority as businesses work to meet changing consumer demands and ensure they won’t be caught off-guard by whatever comes next. But to achieve digital transformation, organizations must choose between a dizzying number of data integration techniques and strategies to connect their legacy systems with the solutions they rely on for growth and innovation.
This post examines some of the most common data integration techniques and strategies, their pros and cons, and how they perform in different use cases.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Benefits of Data Integration
Does your organization really need data integration? The answer depends, of course, on your business model, but is probably yes.And even if you don’t strictly need integration, your organization could probably benefit from it. Here are just a few benefits of integrating your data:
Reduced costs– Many forms of data integration automate the transfer of data between systems, meaning you dedicate less resources to moving data manually.
Improved efficiency – Automated integration also eases your IT staff’s workload and reduces the risk of errors.
Enhanced data integrity– Data integration solutions generally have a built-in validation step, so you can make decisions based on your data with confidence that it’s accurate.
Ability to innovate – Integration lets you connect business-critical legacy systems with modern solutions for the power to leverage trends and respond to changing demands.
Increased security– Streamlining permissions and data access becomes simple and straightforward with integration.
5 Common Types of Data Integration
There are five key data integration strategies:
1. Manual Data Integration
As the name suggests, manual data integration relies on custom code to clean and connect data from different sources. This data integration technique is labor-intensive. Every single integration-related task, from converting to the correct format to displaying in the appropriate system, is done manually by a skilled developer.
PROS
Requires minimal maintenance once implemented
Ongoing expenses are lower than other approaches
CONS
Cannot be implemented without the internal coding expertise to create each connection
Manual processes increase the risk of error
Does not scale well unless you have a dedicated team that can keep up with demand for new connections
Cannot support real-time use
Manual data integration works for one-off projects at companies not struggling with a shortage of IT expertise, but there are better candidates for digital transformation projects.
2. Application Integration
Application integration, sometimes called application-based integration, uses automated software tools to collect data from various sources, convert it to the appropriate format, and send it to its destination. This type of data integration frequently features open-source tools and pre-configured connections.
PROS
Fully automated tools require fewer internal resources to use and maintain
Provides seamless data transfer between a wide variety of sources
CONS
Requires technical expertise to deploy
Lack of standardization means services using this technique may deliver inconsistent results
Some risk to data integrity as it moves between systems
If your organization is looking for a way to integrate a limited quantity of data from a limited number of sources, application integration may be the right strategy for you. Enterprise digital transformation efforts may exceed the capabilities of this type of data integration.
3. Uniform Data Access Integration
Data virtualization is the key to this data integration technique. This strategy involves creating virtual versions of integration data that users can search and analyze without removing the core data from its secure location.
PROS
Supports real-time data use and analysis
Reduced storage costs since data remains in a single location
CONS
Only suitable for similar types of integration data
Too many requests can overwhelm the system and lead to failure
Accessing data from multiple points simultaneously can compromise integrity
Uniform data access integration is a powerful solution for organizations looking to save on data storage in their integration process, provided demand does not increase.
4. Common Storage Integration
This data integration method, also known as data warehousing, consolidates data from multiple sources into an entirely new system built to transform, store, and serve data to users as needed.
PROS
Consolidating data in a single location protects its integrity
Latency is very low
Data can be accessed and managed regardless of the status of the source system
CONS
Building a new system to house and process data drives up implementation and maintenance costs
There can be some latency issues as data is transferred into the system from different sources, meaning real-time data access is not possible
If your company has the financial and human resources to support the high cost of data warehousing and a need to perform complex data analysis tasks, this type of data integration could work for you.
5. Middleware Data Integration
Like manual data integration, middleware is pretty much what it sounds like. Middleware data integration relies on a third-party tool that serves as a technical layer between (or in the middle of) your operating system and applications to format and validate data as it moves between systems.
Middleware integration solutions come in various forms, some requiring technical expertise and others that are intuitive and easy to use, regardless of skill level.
PROS
Automated or partially automated, allowing developers to focus on applications without worrying about connectivity
Creates uniformity at interface level for improved oversight and insights
Some options come with third-party monitoring or maintenance
CONS
Can require skills or expertise to deploy and maintain (varies by provider)
This data integration technique is ideal for digital transformation initiatives and connecting legacy systems with more modern tools and solutions.
How to Choose an Integration Tool
According to the 2022 State of Enterprise Integration report, only 7% of enterprise IT professionals say their organization has successfully adopted an integration strategy, so if you’re still in the planning stages, you’re not alone. But how do you choose the solution that’s right for you?
Here are four key factors to consider when weighing different types of data integration:
Basic requirements
Each of the five types of data integration we’ve discussed has different benefits and drawbacks. Make sure the strategy you select fits your organization’s needs. For example, if you need to scale operations up and down, manual coding is probably not the answer to your integration issues.
Effects on your team
Some data integration techniques require a lot of technical skill or knowledge to implement and maintain. How will that affect your team? Skilled IT experts are already in short supply, so it’s wise to choose a solution that you know you’ll be able to handle.
Daily operational impact
Understanding how you’ll access integrated data and how implementation and maintenance tasks will affect your business is also critical. Examine how disruptive the data integration technique you choose will be, and be sure your organization is prepared for the time it will take to deploy it and onboard staff.
Business goals
A solution that meets your data integration needs now might not hold up in the future. Consider your longer-term goals beyond the immediate need to integrate, and choose a strategy that will support those outcomes as well.
Let the Integration Experts at Digibee Help
At Digibee, we eat, sleep, and breathe data integration. Our low-code iPaaS offers all the benefits of a middleware integration solution without any of the drawbacks.
Our intuitive visual interface eliminates the need for niche expertise to create integrations and makes building integrations more efficient. Book a demo today to discover how Digibee can help you.
What are the biggest priorities for your business? If you asked that same question of everyone in your organization – or even just those in the c-suite – would you get the same answer? Probably not.
Going around the table, you might end up with multiple, often conflicting priorities from different areas of your organization. Getting everyone on the same page is hard enough with business-related issues, but when it comes to IT integration, conflicting priorities often delay business-critical integrations, or sideline projects altogether.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
How Can You Get Everyone on the Same Page When it Comes to IT Integration?
To have a successful enterprise integration, business leaders must:
Identify conflicting integration strategies
Decide on organization’s top priorities
Create a business plan on how to work together to achieve priority goals
Identifying Conflicting Priorities
According to the Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report, five different types of integrations were generally ranked evenly as priorities, regardless of differing perspectives across the organization.
Many of these areas have competing but also overlapping functionality. To gain a better understanding of the conflicting priorities, let’s find out why these different types of integrations are considered priorities, and why they are important to your business.
What Are the Top Priorities for Integration Strategies
1. B2B Integrations
What is B2B integration?
Business-to-business (B2B) integration is when two or more companies connect and automate their business processes and related data.
Why is B2B integration important for your business?
It’s understandable why B2B partnerships are so important to business leaders today. B2B integration can help you gain a better understanding of your value chain with more overall insight into potential supply chain delays or roadblocks. Integrating B2B processes can also help streamline processes and build partnerships, which are becoming increasingly vital in today’s business landscape.
A B2B integration platform can combine complex data across multiple partner applications and transform that data into standardized formats for streamlined insights throughout your business ecosystem. Automating key business processes and protocols can enable your company to work and communicate more effectively and efficiently with your key business partners, suppliers, and customers.
2. Data Integrations
What is data integration?
Data integrations are when data from multiple sources are combined into one single view. Gartner research shows there is momentum in the data integration tools market driven by multi-cloud and hybrid data integration requirements. According to Gartner, complex data transformation and flexibility of data movement are some of the key capabilities of data integrations.
Why is data integration important for your business?
The importance of data integration cannot be understated. There are several benefits to your business, such as improved data quality and integrity, automated data transfer, overall insights throughout your enterprise or business ecosystem, reduced costs and better return on investment (ROI), seamless data transfer between multiple systems, and real-time insights across the board, leading to better collaboration and decision-making capabilities.
3. System Integrations
What is system integration?
System integration involves connecting multiple disparate IT systems and applications to create one overarching cohesive system infrastructure.
Why is system integration important for your business?
System integrations can play a key role in your business, as they connect systems that don’t usually communicate with each other. Combining these systems can streamline processes and make your business more agile, resulting in increased productivity, more accurate insights and analytics, more informed management, reduced costs, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction.
4. Application Integrations
What is application integration?
According to Gartner, application integrations enable independently designed applications to work together. This can be a game-changer for your company in departments that use several different applications where integration would increase efficiency, and if you want to connect multiple applications across the enterprise.
Why is application integration important for your business?
Gartner states that application integrations can help orchestrate the flow of activities performed by several disparate software applications. They can also create consistent data across independent applications, and provide access and functionality from independently designed applications into a single interface for the user.
5. API Management
What is API management?
Application Programming Interface (API) management covers a broad range of functions. It encompasses the overall process of creating, publishing, managing, and analyzing API connections within an enterprise. Individual APIs include a set of operations available to app developers. According to Gartner, API management includes the people, processes, and technology used by an organization to safely and securely publish APIs.
Why is API management important for your business?
API management solutions distribute, control, and analyze APIs that connect applications and data. API management can enable digital transformation, manage internal and external relationships with API users, and drive business value from APIs. The value gained from an API management solution is largely dependent on the vendor selected to provide the service, so your business should do its homework before selecting the right business partner to work with.
It might appear that there is a lot of overlap in these competing priorities. An enterprise integration platform-as-a-service solution can integrate all of these competing priorities into one successful solution. In order to reach that goal, you need to define your priorities.
Clearly Define Priorities and Work Together to Achieve Them
While integration priorities were scored fairly evenly across all respondents in a Digibee Survey, this lack of a clear objective can result in potential conflicts among stakeholders, which can delay implementation and increase costs.
That’s why it’s important to clearly define your priorities when it comes to your strategic implementation. Internal alignment on an integration strategy is critical to a successful implementation.
As a business leader, you must work and collaborate with the other leaders in your organization to determine the top priorities for your overall business and work together to achieve them. The same principle applies to an IT integration strategy, whether your company’s leading priorities involve B2B integrations, data integrations, system integrations, application integrations, or API management.
To get started, build your enterprise integration strategy focused on a single objective as a first step, and understand the roadblocks to enterprise integration.
You can also take an overall approach with enterprise integration Platform-as-a-service. An iPaaS solution is a scalable subscription-based service that connects your current systems with new technologies and combines organizational data regardless of underlying silos or legacy infrastructure.
Successful, cost-effective integrations are achievable, and an iPaaS solution can help you reach your goals.
Remember when we all thought robots were coming to take our jobs? It turns out that was the opposite of the problem we needed to prepare for. Instead of a lack of positions, industries across the US (and around the world) are facing an unprecedented shortage of skilled employees.
This trend is particularly acute in IT departments, and leaders are scrambling to implement IT cost reduction strategies as they compete for a dwindling pool of experts they need now more than ever.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
The Rise of IT Integration
The IT talent shortage has been driven by a range of factors, including unreasonable hiring requirements and the pandemic-driven “Great Resignation.” But the point where the skilled labor shortage and rising IT demand converge is the increased pace of digital transformation as companies look to modernize legacy systems to compete with their online-only rivals.
Enterprises looking to unlock siloed data and connect new technologies to aging architecture are turning to integration. The vast majority – 93% – of CIOs, developers, and system architects recognize their organization will benefit from integration. At the same time, just 7% have successfully implemented an integration solution – and a lack of skillsranks among the top five roadblocks.
The Solution: Low Code Integration Platforms
Faced with an urgent need to modernize and embrace new technologies, compounded by an IT talent shortage, companies are embracing low-code platforms that don’t require the services of niche experts to implement and use.
What a Low-Code Platforms? Low-code solutions use intuitive visual interfaces that simplify development tasks so people without specialized coding expertise can build or customize the tools their organization needs.
An Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service is a low-code integration solution that reduces pressures caused by the confluence of rising demand for modernization and the IT talent shortage, empowering team members with less expertise to take on tasks previously reserved for senior developers.
Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ report 1 on Digibee details the business benefits and cost savings enterprises can realize from implementing an iPaaS.
Source: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Digibee’s Enterprise Integration Platform As A Service (eiPaaS), a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Digibee
Increased Developer Efficiency
Organizations interviewed for the report experienced a variety of developer productivity issues with their existing integration strategies, including:
Skills shortages rendering IT teams unable to deliver integration projects on time
Increasing complexity that platforms and teams could not support
High volume of transactions breaking connections that then had to be rebuilt
The implementation of Digibee’s iPaaS dramatically improved developer efficiency in several ways:
Visual drag-and-drop interface made building integrations faster
Ability to reuse integrations once built reduced the number of integrations developers had to create
Integrated logs and metrics simplified troubleshooting and monitoring tasks
Simplicity of identifying and fixing errors nearly eliminated application rework
Reduced Labor Costs
Using the iPaaS, smaller IT teams were empowered to accomplish more work, helping enterprises reduce labor costs without compromising their ability to innovate.
Increased developer efficiency meant fewer hours were allocated to building and maintaining integrations
Improved oversight and maintenance meant fewer escalations were required
The low-code integration platform allowed organizations to hire more junior developers for regular tasks, freeing up experts to focus on new projects
Let Digibee Help You Reduce IT Spend
Don’t let the global talent shortfall hold back your plans to modernize and compete in the digital-first world. Digibee has proven experience in helping enterprises increase developer productivity and reduce labor costs while dramatically reducing the time it takes to implement an integration strategy.
Posted on December 1, 2022 by Chrissy Lamont - Uncategorized
This white paper outlines tips for strategizing your digital transformation and how Digibee’s cloud native enterprise-ready platform may be your best fit.
A business’s need to build and maintain customer relationships far predates the cloud or the internet. It even predates the Rolodex or the phone. Harnessing the power of sales and marketing in a business is nothing new, yet in that role one must always be future-facing; strategizing to adapt to new tools to keep the customer happy and the business on track.
A growing number of enterprise IT professionals are recognizing the value of integration to their operations, but do the advantages of enterprise application integration really matter to the marketing department?
The short answer: yes.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Balancing Customers, Relationships, and Management
With so many sales and marketing channels available now, a staggering amount of customer data is generated as users flow between them.
Customer relationship management systems (or CRMs) were perhaps the earliest technical solution to the challenge of keeping your customer data organized. With various levels of sophistication, they have been helping support sales since the 1990s, first as stand-alone software, then also becoming an available component within the ERP systems of the day.
While this CRM integration into ERPs was a quantum leap forward in creating one holistic view of the many moving parts, there were still many limitations to relying on a software model.
Enterprise Integration: The Next Logical Step?
As far back as 2019, Forrester reported that “The enterprise resource planning (ERP) era is over.” Though the term ERP has tended to continue in usage, often being blended with EI as “ERP integration” or “ERP system integration”, the notion of an ERP as a single software omni-suite is quickly going the way of the CD-ROMs it was first distributed on.
In a digital-first world where marketing now needs to employ analytics, SEO, lead capture/generation/nurturing, event marketing, ecommerce, and an ever-changing roster of social media tools, it’s not surprising that Gartner analysts predict that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025.
As part of this trend, iPaaS for enterprise organizations are quickly coming to the attention of business leaders. By marrying the omnichannel approach of ERPs with the benefits of the cloud, enterprise integration provides flexibility without complexity.
3 Key Benefits of iPaaS for Marketing
There are several advantages of enterprise application integration that directly address marketing department priorities and challenges.
1. iPaaS Plays Well With Others
Being platform-agnostic is one such example of how a good iPaaS can provide such flexible no-hassle support. It doesn’t get hung up on whether the many tools you are trying to integrate are Microservices, APIs, or cloud-based. They can just as easily be cutting-edge or legacy. If SAP ERP integration is vital to your team’s success, it can now be completed quickly and with minimal downtime.
If your Social Media Manager finds themselves continuously switching between apps, an integration can bring focus and clarity to them while helping to deliver a consistent user experience to the customer.
An effective enterprise ecommerce integration strategy can deliver benefits to both business and customer simultaneously:
“By integrating order fulfillment, a purchase on the website can use inventory information availability across warehouses and retail locations to determine the optimal place (both for the customer and for the business) to ship from based on destination.”
Though security may not be the first thing that comes to mind for marketing, stop and ask yourself what happens in the aftermath of a data breach:
What happens to your customer confidence, and your bottom line?
Who has to craft that message to try and regain trust? (And deal with all the negative customer feedback?)
Simply put, in a world where data breaches are routinely making headlines, moving to an enterprise iPaaS that offers 24/7 monitoring and unparalleled protection and security means less stress for your customer, which translates into less stress for you.
3. iPaaS Supports New Experiences
More so than any other department, marketing needs to be able to recognize and adapt to new trends. As part of this, you need the freedom to adopt the newest tools as soon as they become available.
An iPaaS with a low-code approach allows new tools to be integrated quickly and with less time stuck waiting for your internal developers, and reusable components make managing all the business logic behind them simple.
“Marketing is a science. It relies on real-time data and accurate analytics to shed light on current performance–what’s working and what isn’t–while informing decisions that drive future improvements. This synchronous environment is only possible if all systems are connected.”
Cait Porte, CMO, Digibee
Implementation: Logical Steps & Common Missteps
71% of of respondents are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology
Although there are clearly many benefits to a business, our recent State of Enterprise Integration Report found 71% of those polled are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology.
While this is a majority, many businesses are ending up frustrated in their implementation efforts, reporting impediments that are the inverse of what an EI is meant to provide:
39% impeded innovation
42% ineffective practices
36% lack of agility
Innovation, inefficiency, and agility are imperative in order to meet marketing objectives.
98% of respondents reported they had to rebuild their integrations within a year
The root cause of these negative impacts is often a piecemeal approach to the original integration strategy. The high-level advantages of enterprise application integration may be well understood by the internal tech team tasked to bring it to fruition, but without collaboration with the C-suite and product owners, they lack a depth of understanding of other roles and how they work.
Where this happens it is easy to be left with a system that – while technically integrated – is in no way optimized for each individual team’s needs.
Compare these numbers to relevant numbers pulled from the 2022 SEI Report. Attempting to remediate this after the fact often results in a frustrating loop of building and fixing, with 98% of 2022 report respondents reporting they had to rebuild their integrations within a year.
Number of integrations that had to be rebuilt
1-5: 50%
6-10: 48%
10+: 1%
The impacts of getting caught in this loop can include potential downtime where data is unavailable during rebuilds and then having to re-learn a whole new ERP system integration every time.
Stop the Stop-Gap Solutions
Anyone leading a marketing department already understands how vital a well thought-out strategy is to the success of a project. This strategic lens positions a CMO as an incredibly valuable contributor to a successful EI implementation.
With the changing responsibilities of today’s CMO, the role has often expanded to encompass every aspect of the customer experience. Requiring so many different platforms to generate this customer data, a CMO is poised to be one of the best advocates for ensuring the integration brings benefit to both the business and the customer.
Remember the key elements a marketing team needs most: platform-agnostic, secure, and adaptable. The flexible solutions offered by Digibee are all three, meaning your ecommerce integration, CRM integration, and the integration of the many other tools your team relies on can be completed in weeks, not months.
Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your Marketing team.
Maturity comes with age and experience. This adage is as true for a business as it is for an individual. Anyone can look back to an instance where they were learning a new skill and wish they could have known what they know now. Hopefully most of us can similarly think of something we DIDN’T do because we learned from someone else’s experience.
This universal experience of growth as a process makes a Maturity Model a performance measure that is particularly quick and easy to comprehend and a powerful tool for gaining alignment for business stakeholders in both assessing the current state as well as calculating the best next steps.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
A Data Integration Maturity Model
In this way, the Gartner Integration Maturity Model provides both an excellent self-assessment tool for any business currently considering, or already implementing, enterprise integration.
A Snapshot of the 5 Phases of EI Integration Maturity:
Getting Started
Approximately 30% of Gartner clients*
Stage 1: Ad Hoc
No overall strategy, any integration is on a case-by-case basis
Stage 2: Enlightened
Recognition that integration is an issue; tools begin to be selected, but there is no defined responsibility
Standardization
Approximately 60% of Gartner clients*
Stage 3: Centralized
An ICC is formed to manage platforms, tools and specialists. It defines best practices to promote consistency.
Stage 4: Collaborative
A shift towards more distributed competency is achieved through the formation of an ISET and the implementation of a Hybrid Implementation Platform (HIP)
Business Utility
Approximately <5% of Gartner clients*
Stage 5: Self-Service
With Integration competency now imbedded in the organization, the ISET and HIP support a delivery model that is democratized
*Estimates based on Gartner’s 2019 Business Application Integration survey
Growing Pains? You are Not Alone
This distribution of businesses on the journey towards full integration shows similar trends to what Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report uncovered with our own market analysis of 1000+ participants, with 71% self-reporting are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology.
If so many businesses plan to implement EI, why are there so few that succeed in reaching maturity? What enterprise integration challenges are standing in their way?
“Technology leaders understand the value and urgency in integrating the enterprise, yet many are frustrated in their efforts to achieve this result.”
Peter Kreslins CTO and Founder, Digibee
Three Key Enterprise Integration Challenges
If, upon rating your business against Gartner’s Data Integration Maturity Model, you find yourself somewhere in the beginning or middle stages, consider this a fantastic opportunity to gain speed and efficiency by learning from those who have gone before and where they have succeeded or struggled.
Three distinct challenges emerged for those who have already undertaken enterprise integration:
1. Investing in the Future Still Costs Money
Sure, “technology is the future”, but profitability has to be the future too, right? Since not all technology represents the same value to a specific business, the step that has to happen before the step of integration is getting the budget approved; a sometimes challenging feat. For this reason it is perhaps unsurprising that Gartner writes:
“Justifying investment in integration competencies is difficult, particularly compared with other priorities with a clearer return.”
This quote mirrors Digibee’s findings precisely, with budget being the top enterprise integration challenge:
2. Short-Term Gain, Long-Term Pain
Focusing on short-term goals of the existing application landscape can feel like quick progress, but is another key challenge outlined by Gartner. Immediate needs can often be addressed in multiple ways, but those choices may have unintended consequences that limit options down the road.
A lack of strategy produces a series of stop-gap solutions that need to be continually rebuilt or replaced. Digibee’s 2022 Report found almost 98% of users opting to rebuild at least one integration within the last year, with 48% rebuilding 6 or more; a cycle that severely disrupts the daily operations of a business.
3. Consistency vs. Agility
Gartner cites centralized integration teams’ lack of agility to cope with the demands of a business-driven, product-centric delivery as their third key challenge.
If the Gartner maturity assessment encourages teams just beginning their EI journey to move from Phase 2 (Enlightened) to Phase 3 (Centralized) to improve consistency, for those who have achieved Phase 3 maturity why it is important to shift to a more decentralized, then democratized, delivery to advance further?
Digibee’s Report found impeded innovation and ineffective practices were tied as the top negative impact experienced by business users of a poor integration; lack of agility also topping the list.
Poor integrations have a direct (and negative) impact on the business:
These data integration challenges can reflect a tipping point where EI business use cases have expanded and increased in complexity to a point where one centralized integration team can no longer cope, turning them into more of a bottleneck than an effective means of governance.
An EI Roadmap for Longevity, Profitability and Agility
To effectively mitigate the common challenges faced in Enterprise Integration, Gartner recommends a “a realistic, step-by-step plan and investment approach”. To synchronize each step you take with your end goals of a mature integration, we found taking the time to get two main pieces right will pay dividends for longevity, profitability, and agility in EI:
Align on Goals & Priorities
Make a list of business goals with all your stakeholders up front to get alignment on a clear ranking of priorities. Ensure you take the time to consider these end goals and that each step you are taking today aligns with them.
Although it can be difficult to bring such a varied group of business leaders including the C-Suite, IT team, and product team, to a consensus, taking a piecemeal approach will lead to amplified friction between stakeholders down the line and often results in a business getting stuck in one of the middle stages of maturity and a loop of costly rebuilds.
Map Out Key Players
Factor in budget and how quickly your platform needs to be operational to determine the best combination of internal and external resources.
During this exercise, be sure to craft your resourcing plan to reflect future stages, and anticipated changes in needs as your EI practice matures.
The Right Tool: iPaaS for Your Integration Journey
The final pivotal piece in a smooth journey to EI maturity is choosing the right tools.
Where agility and speed are core benefits of enterprise integration, don’t lose those gains by being locked into a rigid approach. Opting for an Enterprise Integration Product-as-a-Service model such as Digibee will accommodate the evolving needs of your team whether you have an established ISET or only just getting started. Digibee’s low-code approach is infinitely scalable, and a lower upfront investment than building a custom integration solution.
Take a closer look at all the benefits your organization stands to gain by partnering with Digibee – or book a no-obligation demo to see our solution in action.
