Transforming Business Operations through Hybrid IT Integration
April 17, 2018
Integration Issues that Prevent Enterprises from Reaching Benefits
Digital Transformation is moving away from theory to practice. New technologies like cloud, machine learning, Big Data, are poised to upend the traditional ways of working in ways we have never seen before. Enterprises today believe that if they won’t adopt these new technologies and then their competitors will make use of them and steal their business. To stay ahead of the rest, organizations are haphazardly adopting new technologies with little focus on technology integration. But still they find that many of old technologies are on-premise, and in use. Over the years, these technologies and bare metal servers were pampered like Zoo Pandas and now they have turned into beasts with huge databases. These applications are mostly stove-piped and offer very limited modes of integration. Enterprises face dilemmas in aligning these technologies and making them work in tandem. There can be hidden opportunities in the data stored in legacy systems and getting rid of them cannot be a wise decision. Neither, it is a solution to move all applications to cloud. Organizations can harness more value out of their technological investments by creating an intelligent mesh between cloud and ground systems.
Many enterprises still use the direct path of point-to-point connectivity and convectional ESB methodologies to build integrations. This approach works fine for an IT which has two or more systems. But it is not a permanent solution for an enterprise which has a complex mix of Software as a Service, or Platform as a Service (PaaS) based applications. IT teams build independent interfaces to build connectivity between applications which have their own design, architecture, and silo. Each interface inherently involves a lot of coding and marathon cycle runs. Updating one interface requires updation of another interface. Changes in one one interface cause a series of changes to other interfaces as well. A lot of spaghetti coding strangles IT infrastructure, causing frequent network breakdowns, data errors and disruptions. Things get difficult when an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system needs Client Relationship Management (CRM) data or CRM needs accounting data.
Setting up an Overarching Business Benefits Model with Hybrid IT Integration Framework
The right solution to beat back IT complexity is a hybrid IT integration framework. It is a modern day approach to connect cloud and on-premise applications which run in parallel. Hybrid integration helps organizations in setting up a future ready IT architecture that responds faster to business and IT changes. The users can stabilize IT ecosystem which remains in a constant state of flux. Smarter organizations are using the hybrid IT integration model to orchestrate processes, technologies in a cohesive manner and compose them into new services and solutions. This helps them streamline business to business (B2B) operations like customer data onboarding with internal or external partners. In this way, organizations can reduce operational cost, align IT with business, become easier to work with and improve profitability by 10X.
Leveraging Hybrid Integration for Improving Customer Data Onboarding
Customer data onboarding has become the defacto standard for improving services. Successful onboarding gives valuable opportunities to reach the target audience and improve customer journeys. However, onboarding is a different beast altogether. Even organizations with robust competency centers find onboarding as a fundamental challenge. Several months of precious time and money is wasted on building integrations. Services are delayed till the time IT builds the onboarding workflows for data exchange. With a hybrid integration framework non-technical business users can build integrations for data onboarding. Customer Data Onboarding happens in minutes with institutional knowledge and best practices. Without heavy engineering setup and IT intervention teams can exchange data faster with their partners. Teams publish the data with business rules and partners subscribe the published data for executing business operations. This is a great advantage for insurance, banking, manufacturing, etc. companies which have to exchange colossal amount of data internally or externally.
Enterprises are embracing new technologies to gain agility and competitive edge. Many organizations have already made great strides in deploying new technologies. But without a deliberate arrangement for integration, they are finding their benefits vanishing from their radar. Most of the challenges are spawned by growth in complexity. Hybrid IT integration is the perfect strategy to beat back complexity and simplify IT. It helps organization in ensuring continued success from their investment.