You can be an excellent runner and still end up last in a marathon for a lack of a decent strategy or approach. No doubt, the uncharted territory of a marathon is draped with unforeseen issues or circumstances, the absence of a sound strategy can surely augment the possibility of a defeat.
Likewise, businesses with a faulty or rather a stagnant approach ultimately collapse and lose to their counterparts; their revenues are poor, customer’s attrition rate is higher, possibilities of growth & innovation extinguishes.
And like the clock never lies, numbers also don’t which cajole enterprises into behaving like a “loose cannon” – their slapdash organizational structure and strategy makes the business go haywire.
Thus, one of the most recurrent mistakes made by businesses aiming for digital transformation is employing ineffective approaches to ecosystem integration. Not only utilizing such faulty approach can calcify and proliferate data silos, one of the cardinal problems faced by companies, but also impact the organizational dividends, including revenues, productivity, and relationships with customers.
Here are three common aberrations:
●The Traditional Approach:
Companies that bank on traditional integration solution are like those runners who lose the marathon and don’t even know why. Their ignorance of new-age techniques or strategies takes them down.
Speaking of legacy integration solutions, one must be aware of its limitations:
●Traditional integration software is not equipped to handle modern cloud applications & data architecture. It also fails to seamlessly integrate cloud applications like Quickbooks, Amazon S3, Dropbox etc.
●The traditional approach is unable to empower business users to quickly respond to changing business scenarios and requires a skilled IT team for assistance, thereby causing delay and loss of business opportunity & revenue.
Prisoners of age-old integration solutions tend to weaken the customer data onboarding processes to a point when customer experience and loyalty is compromised. Thus the overall productivity plummets down an abyss.
●The point-to-point approach:
Myriad data sources have resulted in the emergence of a wealth of point to point tools, to begin with. Such swarms of point-to-point tools when integrated results in a “web” like structure which are error-prone and hard-to-manage.
Point-to-point approach works well when there are 2 to 3 applications to connect. But as the number of applications or data sources increases, the number of connections increase accordingly. As per the rule:
N(N-1)/2
, where N is the number of application
Now, a project involving only 3 applications will have 3(3-1)/2= 3 connections.
For 10 applications, there will be 10(10-1)/2 = 45 connections and so on.
Hence, as the number of applications scales up, so does the number of connections.
Businesses with this approach dwell in chaos, difficulty, and mismanaged endpoints. Ability to not scale is another drawback of these point-to-point tools. Also, enterprises using this approach find tracing security breaches or audits difficult.
●The Custom-Code Approach:
Relying on manual coding of the integration pipelines is like running the marathon on one leg; you might win but an extensive amount of effort and prosthetics as support will be required.
In-house pipelines are susceptible to breakage that has a direct impact on delaying of the process of uniting your disparate data.
The manual coding approach is, in fact, less scalable than the point-to-point approach. Executing this approach also calls for a highly adept team of developers, which amplifies the overhead expenses further.
Additionally, building a single integration platform manually could consume days or weeks, hence decreasing the efficiency and throughput of the business. Custom-code approach fails to deal with enormous data silos to boot.
Relinquishing the need to bank on outdated and fragmentary approaches is mandatory, unified integration solutions ought to be used instead.
Pacing Business Strategies for Ensuring a “Perfect Win”
Effective business strategy is the underpinning of long-term success, much like a marathon. Modern integration platform is an essential segment of the strategy as it allows:
●Anytime, Anywhere, Anytime Onboarding:With modernized customer onboarding software features such as B2B connectors, reusable integration templates, and application connectors etc. , enterprises can enhance the quality of customers, thereby amplifying revenue, productivity, and time to value.
●Self-Service Integration:Modernized integration platform’s self-service capability is responsible for configuring solutions that require rapid data access, validation, transformation, delivery, reporting, and human interaction quickly and easily— all with greater security and controls to minimize risk. Employing a self-service approach for business users and customers within the digital ecosystem enables businesses to become easier to work with, deliver a delightful customer experience, and embrace digital disruption to gain a competitive advantage. Unified integration platforms help your business get a lap ahead of their competition by automating data flows and building streamlined business processes faster and better.
●Hybrid Integration:No doubt cloud solutions have gained an upsurge in the last few years, there are organizations that count on a heterogeneous mixture of on-premises and cloud solutions to operate. Modern integration platform with its multi-point feature and no-code approach allows enterprises to integrate cloud applications with on-premises data sources across a wide range of endpoints in an easy and effective manner. Further, such solutions enable businesses to respond to new requirements, operate with agility, and drive the business forward.
●Scalability:No matter how much you have trained and thought of a strategy before running the marathon, you are expected to change it on the spot as real-life situations are likely to change. Similarly, your business approach should evolve and grow to meet the changing dynamics of the business. Modern integration platforms should seamlessly tackle with the ever-increasing volume and variety of data. Also, With a modern platform, enterprises can manage your integrations in one simple console.
Your business strategy or approach will decide whether you dominate the game or not. Brace yourself!