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.

API {1st} - Gateway to Digital Innovation

API first is the new paradigm and there is lot of focus towards it. So what does it really mean and why there is so much of talk about it? 

What is API First?

Application Programming Interfaces (API's) are the interfaces provided on the resources that you want to leverage in the interaction process from your customers, partners, employees, business users, etc. via the application or GUI created on top of it.

That means that your applications or GUI will be as good as your API's because what you reflect on your UI is what you get from your API's so it's really important to have good design in place for the API's, that adds:

• Consistency
• Flexibility
• Usability
• Agility 
• Performance
• Security

API First means different things to different people in an enterprise, for CxO level it means that they have to think about investing into a platform that can support the development of API's, being the top priority. For architects it's about focusing on the API design first and deciding the catalog of API that will be made available to the developers for building the apps or webpages around it. For developers it's about how to manipulate the set of API's and develop the award winning applications and be the part of trusted community to provide positive feedback.

So API{1st} design is what we are talking about here, as it's the core for enabling the digital business. Companies like Netflix, Uber, Twitter, etc. have created the whole new business model powered by great API design and architecture around it because it provides a far better customer experience compared from the traditional software development approach where the heavy customer experience was built first and then the API's were created to access and manipulate the data. 

Design has been an important aspect of everything you build and it applies to the API's as well. It's important to have a right design in place up front so that you can understand how your API is going to look like:

• URL format
• supported Message Format
• supported Methods
• Custom Headers if any
• Parameters
• Pagination
• versioning
• exception management
• authentication

It's always good to keep the API's simple so that the developer can look into the definition and work out what it does without reading much of the documentation. I am not suggesting that you should avoid having the documentation around API's, what I am trying to say is that API's should be self -explanatory and consistent across. 

Once the API is designed, share it with the team who are the consumers of it and let them try the Mock API to see if they like it or they want to suggest changes. Once it's finalized move the design to build the API. That's what API{1st} is all about

API{1st} Cycle

Great API's are part of great team work and it's important that there is an effective collaboration between the producers and consumers of the API as all of them will have different perspective and will help in designing a great API.   

To help you with the API{1st} iterative approach many vendors have come up with the products to support that, for e.g -  swagger.io, apiary.io, raml.org, etc.

There are multiple API description languages (ADL's), some of them are very popular (like Swagger) and sort of becoming standard for API's. API Transformer is one online tool that can help you convert one ADL to another and yes at back of it are API's.

Once you are done with design you need to choose a platform to convert the great design into real API's, there are many vendors with API Management products to help with that and my organization Axway is one of them.

If you are looking to start a Digital Journey then for sure API's are the starting point and API{1st} is where you start from.