Integration strategy

In today’s digital world organizations must reshape their integration strategy to meet the demands of digital transformation in an ever changing world of innovation and disruption. For example, CIOs, CDOs, and Enterprise Architects must unify enterprise APIs to maximize the agility of their cloud application portfolio. CTOs, Digital Strategists, and Product Management need to connect various digital business applications to the different SaaS based ecosystems used by their employees, partners and customers. Further, API Product Owners must strive to create peronalized API experiences that are unique to their ecosystem. 

It’s thus important for an organization to assess and analyse their integration approach, identify their current integration capabilities, and improve and move their integration strategy towards a self-serviced and collaborative approach.

We can broadly classify the stage of integration maturity an organization as follows:

STAGE 1

• The company does have any integration strategy in place with no published APIs
• Integration is not considered or recognized as a major need or requirement in the organization
• No endpoints or connectors are available
• Each integration is custom programmed and is executed point-to-point and is probably done on a one-off basis
• Technology used are either File (CSV or FTP) or SDK-based
• The users are limited only to the IT specialists

STAGE 2

• The company has one or more APIs published
• The organization is beginning to recognize the importance of integration and its associated challenges
• No endpoints or connectors are available
• Integrations are still executed point-to-point, custom, and/or basic CRUD/S
• Technologies used for Integration are mostly APIs and are REST, SOAP, or Web-Based
• Users: IT specialist and developer

STAGE 3

• The API is configured and declarative
• The organization may offer external, third party integrations but there is no integration service embedded into their product
• The organization feels competent in integrations offerings
• Limited number of cloud connectors and services are offered
• Synchronization of APIs
• API documentation and a developer portal may be available
• Users: IT Specialist, developer, LOB integrator

STAGE 4

• Embedded integrations offered as self-service or role-based access
• An API integration strategy has been implemented, exposing APIs
• Many cloud connectors and on-premise applications are available
• There is an independent integration strategy group that is responsible for putting multi-step workflows in place and creating pre-packaged templates
• Sophisticated integration user interface, orchestration layer and abstraction layer exists
• Users: IT Specialist, developer, LOB integrator, and citizen integrator

STAGE 5

• An integration cloud is in the product offering
• Many pre-packaged connections are offered along with the ability to integrate and distribute endpoints into leading platforms and API marketplaces
• Capable of experience APIs, creating new connections and workflow templates
• A serverless architecture, or the ability to run code without configuring and managing servers, is supported
• Users: IT Specialist, developer, LOB integrator, citizen integrator, and contributors

If you’re looking to assess your organization’s current integration maturity level and discover how you can improve, or determine the best next steps, our integration consultants at Incepta Solutions are here to help you. You can view more about our services at www.inceptasolutions.com