The world is changing fast and "it's
no longer the Big beating the small but the Fast beating the slow",
due to changing customer expectations around experience.
Industrial revolution 4.0 has helped fuel the pace with which businesses are evolving or rather revolutionising using smart technologies. It has created a challenge for leaders across different industries.
Industrial revolution 4.0 has helped fuel the pace with which businesses are evolving or rather revolutionising using smart technologies. It has created a challenge for leaders across different industries.
With that in mind traditional
businesses are undergoing two journeys - "Digital Business
transformation" and to support that journey/goal they undergo "IT
modernisation". Given the digital journey, most businesses are
now focused on - Speed to market, Agility, ease of Innovation and
obviously Cost. Digital transformation is not a destination, it's an
ongoing journey and same applies to modernisations. Without business objective,
modernisation on its own is not enough, modernisation helps save money, but
digital transformation help make money.
Key challenge for these two journeys
are "Cultural shift" and "Integration Evolution" to align
with raised customer expectations. Let's talk about integration evolution
as cultural shift is a wider topic and not intended for this blog.
However, I would like to highlight that it's an important one and without that
any transformation journey just becomes an overhead and never succeed.
When I talk about "Integration
Evolution", it basically means that organisations have to re consider
their integration strategy from the new business capability perspective
to support easy adoption and integration of new technologies and design
patterns to be digitally enabled.
How does that relate to business though? It does, as business can't be successful in transformation if they don't address it. I don't see business and IT as different teams anymore, they are one team, technology adoption is now driven by business needs and should be delivered based on how business wants to consume it and thus being budgeted as well by them. In case of Digital transformation, strategy is key and is driven by "Digital Leaders", who can best digitally reimagine the business and unite rest of the leadership to deliver.
Basically, business drivers trigger change in how solutions are implemented, these two are tightly coupled. Hence, it's all about business business and business.
In a survey done
by Axway, 91% participants agreed that "being able to integrate seamlessly
across different systems, departments, and partners is crucial for business
success".
To address speed to market
"evolution of integration" within ecosystem becomes vital. It's not
easy when you have to start looking modernising the application ecosystem and
at same time support digital business outcomes for your customers. Key
challenges around these journeys would be -
Modernisation
|
Digital Enablement
|
Distributed Application landscape
|
How to expose interfaces(API's) for digital business
|
New Integration patterns to be
supported
|
Security concerns
|
Leverage investment
in different legacy applications and technologies
|
Central catalog for all API's and Events to allow innovation
|
Having central ecosystem governance due to hybrid application ecosystem and geo distributed teams
|
|
How to achieve process refinement
and automation
|
I have depicted challenges under two
different buckets, they sit under one strategy but are addressing two different
journeys.
Survey participants highlighted few key
challenges that are slowing them down, these challenges can be categorised in
four key areas: Deployments (cloud and on-premises), domains (multiple
integration patterns), endpoints (number and security of connections), and
personas (people accomplishing integrations). The below view depicts these
challenges -
What should be the Strategy?
Moving towards Digital Enablement Platform will not only
provide a single pane of glass to govern all your integrations but also help
build new innovative applications. It helps specialist personas to work as
enabler for business functions by creating pre-packaged templates. It allows
non tech users to leverage interactive apps and templates with no little
knowledge around them helping with speed to market and cost reduction. It can also help CxO's to bring their investment under
different technologies(gateway's) under one umbrella for better governance and efficiency.
This is a high-level view of the
platform that organisations should start looking to get too.
How it Helps?
Digital Enablement Platform supports
all integration interaction styles and patterns as a platform, so it really helps
speed up building integrations with hybrid deployed applications and adopt new
architecture patterns and technologies. API's and Events in the ecosystem
surfaced under unified catalog not only allow to be leveraged by different
integrations but can be consumed by different channels to create experience
that customers are looking for.
It's not only the Hub for all
integrations but also allow innovation, as API's and events (AI and ML can be
leveraged) are route to innovation in digital ecosystem. With use of modern
technologies around mini and micro services it also takes away the pain of
micro service management which is an overhead when it comes to modernisation of
applications and it not just create complexity but also makes the operational
management a night mere.
Business or Trading partner and consumer management is a long process in the organisations and hindrance to speed to do business with new partners or open new business channels. Platform addresses that as well by not only saving time on on boarding process but making it smoother experience with minimum operational overhead.
While doing all this security is
paramount and is a key concern from most business leaders as they move towards
hybrid ecosystem and digital channels. Platform becomes the defence
line by not only protecting all the inbound and outbound communications, but it
also protects all internal interactions and allow central security policy
definition and enforcement.
Basically, it's a recipe that will address all integration challenges that organisations are expected to face during the transformation journey and Axway AMPLIFY has all the ingredients for the required recipe.
However, with growing complexity of change, platform vendors have to ensure that they keep with the market pace to allow their customers to focus on business capabilities and they support all the required tech capabilities with changing market trends.
Strategy and Business Value
How it will help derive business value?
The measurement of it is more aligned to business objective of getting
digitally transformed and impact with experience by generating more revenue and
saving on cost.
- Gateway to Experience
Economy
It enables
organisations for creating experience that their customers are looking
for, it helps set the business for today and for future.
- Innovation
Digital Enablement Platform provide customers
with stream of events and API's which are key for building innovative
applications. AI and ML can be leveraged on events across the ecosystem
including IoT data that can be part of the business process. This allows
customers to build intelligent and interactive apps for their customers.
Innovation allows business to grow many
folds and build experience economy based around customer demands and thus is a
big contributor towards business success or getting business into smart
business mode.
- Speed
Speed to market is a key while transforming
the business, new offerings have to be delivered fast as it is key to keep the
customers engaged. Speed to Market is achieved when you have enhanced developer
experience with the ability to deliver fast. Platform provides that capability
by -
- Auto catalog as services
and events surface
- Quick Data Virtualisation
through API's in minutes rather days.
- Quickly deliver Experience
API's based on need
- Allow focus on Business
Logic and help speed consumption by taking overhead away
- Building integration in
hours compared to days, for e,g from Salesforce to ServiceNow or from SAP
cloud to on-prem.
- Fast Track on boarding of
Trading Partners
All this allow team to
deliver offerings quickly to the market.
- Agility
Digital Enablement Platform allows customers to adopt new
applications and implement new business process in fast changing environment.
It allows to build based on changing customer requirements and release those
capabilities quickly to the market.
- Cost savings
Below are few examples around direct
cost saving but should not be limited too -
- Quick development based on
no code low code integration development
- API's or services that can
be reused, so factor of reusable component and ease of API life cycle
management help save cost
- Central Security around all
integration patterns save effort and operational overhead around it
- scalability and high
availability of services with least configuration
- Operational intelligence
along with central alerting across the board saves cost on continuous
monitoring of applications
- Experience driven platform
will help different personas with recommendations and suggestions based
on their interest
- Trading partner on-boarding
from month/days to couple of hours saves a lot on the process.
Given all above benefits, Digital Enablement Platform should help customers with not only direct cost savings
but in also business growth. There is no one formula or framework to measure
the benefits as it will depend on organisations and their maturity. However,
it's pretty evident from above that Businesses have to have strong platform strategy now to achieve targeted outcome.
Yes....Platform Platform and Platform!
If you want to discuss more around it, please connect with our Catalysts to discuss.
If you want to discuss more around it, please connect with our Catalysts to discuss.