By Boomi
It wasn’t all that long ago that business operations were uber-centralized. Large enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Oracle and SAP were the bedrock for company business processes. So, organizations tended to stick with products from one of these large, trusted vendors. As these systems were monolithic, everything was (technically) integrated. Whether or not this was a good integration experience is a topic for another post.
That was then, and this is now.
Today, look behind the scenes at any company, large or small, and you’ll find something much different and much more chaotic. Legacy ERP systems still remain at the heart of organizations, of course. But now, many mission-critical business processes are distributed among hundreds of applications – if not more. The landscape has completely changed. The business expectations have not!
Technology Fragmentation Is the Business Story of Our Time
Software as a Service (SaaS) adoption has grown among companies with 1,000-plus employees, to an average of 288 applications. That was a 42 percent increase in just one year. And these applications are delivered via user experiences that have also multiplied exponentially – such as bots, screenless, IoT devices, etc. Ultimately, businesses are responsible for streamlining processes across this dizzying array of applications and enabling that instant-gratification, user-friendly customer experience that people expect in our one-click world.
This is not a trivial task. Never before in the history of technology have so many groundbreaking trends been relevant at the same time. Cloud (everything-as-a-service). AI and machine learning. Data lakes. Cloud-native 12-factor apps. Containerization. Microservices. Service Mesh. Serverless. API management. Integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Eventing/Streaming. Low/No Code. CI/CD, DevOps/GitOps/FinOps (xOps). Agile. Indeed, these are exciting times to be a developer!
However, as every Main Street business becomes more software-driven out of necessity, they have to keep up with all of these quickly changing technology trends, while also focusing on running their core businesses and delivering value to their customers. And an incredible amount of technical skill is needed to keep up with this mind-numbing complexity. It’s hard for companies to find and hire the right people, as the technologies continue to mature and change.
How can your organization make sense of this technology fragmentation and get everything working together smoothly to drive positive business outcomes?
There are plenty of solutions, like those in the iPaaS category, that focus on unifying the technically fragmented world. At Boomi, we call this unification “creating Integrated Experiences.” Here are three critical steps to making that happen:
Get Your Data Right
Data runs the modern world. And the amount of data inside our organizations is exploding as we continue to add more applications. That creates data silos.
These silos are why an estimated 60 percent of data within organizations is unused, inaccessible, or just unknown. It’s dark data. That’s a lost opportunity. You need to discover, catalog and prepare all of your data, so the right people can access information to help them make the best decisions. You then need to create canonical data models and synchronize these diverse datasets across heterogeneous applications to create consistency across your business.
Connect the Data
All of those applications that businesses incorporate into their technology stacks? They weren’t necessarily designed to work cohesively to meet business needs. Organizations often are forced to piece solutions together. Only they’re not using lego blocks, but rather a house of cards! Many are using custom-coding, which is expensive, time-consuming, and breaks easily.
It’s essential to utilize a loosely coupled but highly aligned, business-focused platform that can accelerate business outcomes. This explains the trend toward low-code integration to create a fabric of connectivity that inexpensively brings order to that messy IT landscape by eliminating data silos and extending a consistent tool set for internal and external use cases e.g. integrating vendors, suppliers, and distributors.
Enable the Data to Empower User Engagement
Delivering connected data over the last mile requires enabling secure access to that data and providing the ability to quickly create the right user interfaces to satisfy business needs. That includes allowing developers to create and manage access to standardized application programmatic interfaces (APIs).
You also must empower business analysts and “citizen integrators” to accomplish tasks without assistance from specialized programmers. Low-code platforms can help organizations quickly build applications and automation workflows that create enterprise-grade, production-ready applications in days and weeks – not months.
Summary
The integration problem is complex, but the solution doesn’t need to be. Here’s one piece of advice as you think through how you want to end fragmentation at your organization:
Concentrate on the business problem, not the technologies.
Technology is just a means to an end. Find the tool that solves the business problem, and not the other way around. Try out proofs of concept (POCs). Identify where you can show business value by accelerating time-to-value.
Maybe one day the pendulum will swing back from thousands of best-in-breed applications to a consolidation around solutions from a few mega-vendors. But that seems highly unlikely given the accelerating trend towards decentralization. For now, the pragmatic business solution to a world where fragmented technology is the norm is to focus on an integrated experience.
Want to start planning your own unified experience? Get our ebook Chaos to Order: Connecting a Fragmented Digital Landscape Through Modern Integration