Digital Transformation has quickly become ubiquitous in the world of business. Digital is impacting the way organisations need to respond to changing customer needs, blurring industry boundaries and creating new opportunities & threats. Organisations have typically responded to the digital disruption by appointing a CDO, putting a Digital Strategy and building a ‘digital platform’. The objective of the platform is to deliver solutions that are agile, scalable and quick to market. However, the platform cannot deliver its promise by just being standalone and needs to be integrated with rest of its organization.
Decades of IT investment have created many systems (connected or otherwise) that hold key information about customers and internal enterprise. Without proper system integration, the digital platform remains disparate and unable to interact with key information (holding behind the enterprise systems) needed to deliver seamless customer experience and operational excellence. Without this integration, the platform will not truly deliver the promised transformation.
So what’s new with the Integration for Digital Transformation?
Like many other aspects of IT, Enterprise Integration has been around in forms of EAI, ESB and SOA. Organisations have spent huge amounts of money, time and effort to achieve this conventional integration. With advances in AI, cloud computing and reliable networks, we don’t need big, fat integration platforms. As digital transformation evolves, enterprise integration is perpetually shifting from backend plumbing to being critical in binding the ecosystem. The key difference from the previous approach is that there are a large number of aspects involved in integration this time: cloud and on-premise, agile delivery, multitude of things and systems, APIs, big data, digital channels, plug & play architecture.
One approach proving its worth to deliver ‘Enterprise Integration’ for successful digital transformation is, low-code integration delivered by citizen developers. With this approach organisations don’t need to rely on costly/difficult to find integration developers and over-engineered integration platforms. They can deliver this integration with their own citizen developers on low-code digital platforms. These low-code digital platforms are also empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), that means developing integrations are intuitive, self-learning and build for change.
Getting the right integration approach in place and properly integrating digital platform with rest of the enterprise systems would be a great first step on the journey to deliver true digital transformation.
