Digital Enablement Platform and Business Value

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. 

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.

Journey of Digital

Digital transformation will be a major business priority for the next 12 months.
Though the biggest challenge organisations face today is on "How to approach and get enabled for Digital disruption" so basically how to start the journey.

Cultural Shift 

Business environment is changing fast and so will the organisation structures and culture. Digital business means NO IT department anymore, yes you heard it right. Business is becoming more involved in IT strategy so IT means Business and Business means IT now. Business need a platform of Innovation so that they can do business in an innovative way, they can't do that in traditional IT method. It requires out of box thinking, that is to bring the culture of Innovation, so that's the key starting point with below considerations-

• Promote the culture of Innovation.
• IT teams are no more traditional delivery teams for information technology, they are rather business innovators. 
• Provide the platform of Innovation with goal to move towards 3rd generation platform 
• Collaborate and work towards what customers are demanding but don't stop innovating, so form a balance between two.

As a starting point I talked about on how organisations should change the culture and embark on the Journey of Digital. Now as I have spoken about the Platform of Innovation and 3rd generation platform, so let me elaborate on what they are.

3rd Generation platform 

Let's first see how the platforms have evolved and then focus on 3rd generation.

Platform Evolution - Courtesy IDC 

The picture above is self-explanatory so I will leave it there.

However, it's important that we talk about the 3rd generation platform as that should be the target of an enterprise, not only to open the door for the innovations but essential for changing the way business works. Being innovative, agile, efficient and grab opportunities that are outside-out.

3rd Generation Platform - Courtesy  IDC 

Above picture depicts the 3rd generation platform and shows the innovation accelerators. It's focused towards transforming the IT value proposition and making it Business centric. It's not necessary that you adopt the 3rd generation platform as big-bang or all of it, definitely it need evaluation on what accelerators are on the priority list.

Technology Value Proposition - Courtesy IDC

Technology value proposition has changed drastically and technology is now driving the new products and services that business wants to sell transforming the customer experience from better to best.


3rd generation platform is certainly changing the business model and reducing the gap between business and IT, bringing more collaboration and stickiness.

Business Proposition - Courtesy IDC

Platform of Innovation

There are multiple products that can form the platform of Innovation but to me the most important one that glue everything together and provide the FOUNDATION for it is API Management, as it not only enables the enterprise to do innovation but also provide a wrapper for the 1st and 2nd generation platforms so that you can leverage the functionality provided by those platforms in a modern way. It allows you to expose your assets via API's and hence allow all the innovation accelerators to leverage the data that they need.  

API First is the way to go to start and encourage innovations as that will form the base for the customer experience that you want to bring in. It will provide developers a platform to do innovative thinking and do technology clinics (hackathons) to showcase what is possible.

This will help provide all other accelerators in 3rd generation platform with the data sets that they need to work on, whether its internet-of-things, robotics or predictive engines. All of them need to communicate to the enterprise and exchange data via a centralized and secure hub and that is none other then API Management which not only provide enhanced security but also helps in managing the consumers of the data/API.  

Approach

Implementing API management can be taken in stages rather then just start thinking of API first, as organisations have to bring the change in the culture, thought process and change in the existing enterprise integrations that you do till now. The communication was more Inside-In and Inside-Out but now we are talking about Outise-In and Outside-Out communication so its important that the integration and security strategy is written keeping that in mind.

Key consideration are:

1. Existing investment on Enterprise Service Bus and Messaging platform
2. Communicating between on-premise and Cloud Applications
3. Communicating between cloud applications
4. Securing the communication
5. Support of new technology trends and quick adoption if required. Choose the products that align with the 3rd generation platform features, for e.g. product that support easy cloud adoption, automation via container technology, etc. 

It's important that we understand the To-Be state architecture with the API Management solution in place. 

To-Be State

• The red color box are the one introduced with API Management
• Orange lining are the one that are new in each layer
• This is first stage change in to the To-Be state. Once the enterprise is ready to adopt the cloud services either partially or fully the To-Be state of all below will reflect as a Service "_aaS".
• All other innovation accelerators can be either used in parallel or later as the business deem it fit and ready for bigger disruption.

To-Be Architecture

Given that the existing integration products are kept intact, how to change the world with API's?

It's a million dollar question given the ecosystem that most of the enterprises have, it gets tricky to get hold of the right approach.

The best is to have the API Management implementation done in 3 stages:

API Stage Implementation 

Move from Left to Right with your API strategy 

• Stage 1 - Wrap the existing SOA services based on enterprise service bus (ESB) by using the policies created in the API Gateway. This will quickly enable you to provide the developers with something that they can play and innovate. The challenge can be coarse grained services but you can use the wrapper to make them fine grain by specifically choosing the operations that you want in a particular API. 

• Stage 2 - Enable the existing applications to start using the API Management platform to create API's directly instead of using any other layer.  

• Stage 3 - Make API's the core of all the applications that you have in the ecosystem. Not only the customer facing applications but most of the applications of record should also move in that direction and once you start adopting SaaS platforms that will happen. The reason being that legacy applications will struggle to scale with the growth required. Even the best and effective API will struggle, if the back end application can't respond quickly and scale based on the number of request then you have a challenge. 

If you see all the above three stages require some design upfront to understand what is that you want to do with the API's and hence its important that you start thinking of two things:

1. What you want the API's to do 
2. What data set you want access via API

It's really important that you design the API's first with tools like Swagger or Apiary and provide the developers to do the innovation out of it and see if it works, otherwise go into iterations till you improve it. Once you are happy with the design convert that into real API. 

Your application will be as Good as your API's, so make sure that the foundation is right and strong.

3rd Generation platform require change in all the layers of the architecture, infrastructure with new containers technology so that you can scale up with the unlimited growth that you can see with new innovations that you put in place. It requires change in your analytics layer as you will have more and more data that you can use to create information that gives you business edge. Right information at right time is very important for business and now with 3rd generation the time taken to provide and use that information is equally important, predictive is way forward not reactive. Change in the integration layer and change in applications by moving to SaaS based. 

Operational efficiency is equally important so its not only about scaling up but you need to automate the process to scale down when you are using cloud services as its "pay as you use" model and you don't want to pay for something that you are not using.

It's not going to be easy journey and hence a short term and strategic plan is important.

Short Term Plan

• Fast track the API management deployment. 
• Start with small perimeter, select the business area for creating API's
• Leverage existing services and wrap them up with API by using API Gateway product.
• Start innovating focused on enhancing customer experience by using the API's 

Strategic Plan

• API as a core(API First), start building the API's directly from the Data source and applications that you have got, replacing the legacy services.
• Start focusing on Predictive Analytics, turn information into competitive advantage.
• Omni- experience transformation - Any data, Any time, Any Where with consistency.
• Cloud adoption
• Operating model transformation

Before I conclude, I thought of reiterating the key points

Key Take Away-

1. Introduce the culture of Innovation
2. Replace the word IT with Innovation - Chief Innovation Officer
3. Build Platform of Innovation 
• API First
• Start small and accelerate
• Go Big and iterative

Remember, Digital transformation is not a destination it's a journey.

Go Digital because Digital is Life and you need to be innovative part of it.