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Service integration and automating the flow of data between applications is essential in building a digital organization .
The complexity of the modern IT environment is something that all organizations are struggling with. Not only are many of them in the middle of a difficult digital transformation journey but, at the same time, they are reinventing the way they provide services to their employees and customers.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the intersection of data and applications.
The application landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years with the decisions around what applications to use being increasingly driven by the demands of end users, both internal and external.
Applications are increasingly being viewed not as an end in themselves but as conduits for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data. With data at the heart of the digital business, integrating the services provided by the various applications has become critical.
This has placed incredible pressure on IT teams to ensure that services are seamlessly integrated, and that the relevant data is shared seamlessly between applications. It's no longer good enough for information to exist in silos scattered across the organisation. Information needs to be available wherever and whenever it is needed. It's the oxygen that the digital organisation breathes and there are dire consequences for any part without access to it.
The challenge is that with a vast array of applications in use and data seemingly coming from all sides it's hard for an organisation to knit all it all together. This requires the automation of many of the processes that were delivered in a semi-manual way in the past and it's at this point that organisations are looking to their technology partners to guide the way.
By leveraging the knowledge of a trusted system integrator it's possible to abstract away the complexity inherent in integrating multiple services. By providing seamless access to an organisation's data it becomes possible for them to create a more personalised customer experience.
Effective systems integration is critical to creating an agile organisation. For companies hoping to compete against traditional competitors as well as born digital organisations, speed is essential.
We are seeing this desire for speed manifest itself in the rise of DevOps where iterations to applications are being pushed out constantly, with machine learning systems also being leveraged to speed up the process of tweaking the output of applications to deliver greater insights.
This rapid iteration of functionality in development space would have been impossible just a few years ago as interdependencies between applications had to be tightly managed to ensure that changes in one place didn't have a negative knock-on effect in others.
The development of the API ecosystem, the emergence of tools to manage integration, and the creation of automation platforms are all part of ensuring that incremental changes can be rolled out with confidence.
The is, in fact, greater danger to organisations that don't adopt a strategy of constant innovation. Not only are their competitors pushing ahead, but there is the real risk of their business users simply side-stepping them and finding services that deliver the functionality they desire. Not only does this cut the IT team out of the decision-making process, but more importantly it means that siloes of information are created throughout the organisation, restricting the benefits that integration brings.
