When a company make attempts to transform digitally, they often focus on the external facets such as improved efficiency and higher speeds. What they fail to do is to look under the hood.
Looking under the hood is a crucial step for application leaders driving digital transformation. In other words, they must focus on more than potential advancements in agility, profitability, and new revenue streams. What supports these top-level improvements is the important integration work that brings different technology initiatives together, making business outcomes greater than ever.
Organizations need a radical integration approach that can handle challenges posed by digital transformation. Experiencing the way customer think and function is one of them. Business users need to establish constant connectivity with data from customers in order to comprehend their needs and ultimately serve them better. Internet of Things (IoT) has complicated matters to boot. Organizations are focused on employing IoT as a driver of incremental revenue streams on the basis of new products and services. It requires them to cut down costs and enhance productivity, alleviate operational overhead, and optimize operational efficiencies. Data explosion aggravated the complexity even further. Organizations need to integrate large volumes of complex, bi-directional data feeds for greater insights and decision-making.
Added Complexity Requires a Hybrid Integration Approach
In most cases, the traditional data integration solutions fail to address the complexity attached to digital transformation. Organizations need to adopt what Gartner calls a hybrid integration platform or HIP approach. In simple terms, HIP is the home for all functionalities that ensure the smooth integration of a plethora of digital transformation initiatives in an enterprise.
Related White Paper: Six Secrets for Building a Great Hybrid IT Integration Architecture
Deploying a hybrid integration platform to handle various scenarios means that organizations must also shift to maintain the edge. The conventional IT-controlled centralized integration team with its legacy features will need to shift towards an approach that supports HIP-enabled, -service integration that empowers business, subsidiaries, application development teams and eventually business users.
In a majority of cases, application leaders are revamping existing integration strategies to support cloud services, AI-based systems, IoT, and mobile apps. Modern technologies such as Hybrid Integration Platform powered by self-service have a major role to play here.
A successful hybrid integration solution supports all four of the following dimensions:
Personas (constituents): Ad hoc integrators, digital integrators, integration specialists, and citizen integrators.
Integration Domains: Data, application, B2B and process.
Endpoints: Mobile devices, on-premises devices, the cloud, and IoT devices.
Deployment models: Cloud, on-premises, hybrid and embedded in IoT devices.
While deploying a hybrid integration platform can help business handle customer and make connections faster, it’s important for them to remember that IT needs to focus on the role of governance. IT no longer have to integrate new customers as it can be done by business users or non-techies. Meanwhile, IT users can focus on more high-value tasks that future-proof organization’s needs.
Simply put, for the HIP to excel in its intended role, it’s important that the business users create faster data connections and IT users take the strategic role and build a realistic assessment of future requirements.