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abhijit_masih
Explorer
We all have been hearing about digital transformation and how this is changing our day to day life and also how important is this for any business growth and future. We can deep dive into this and understand what digital transformation means to each of us .

In this blog we will focus on why proper Integration strategy is needed for digital transformation and what are main areas on which we should focus while designing our Integration strategy.

Why Integration is important for Digitization : I am sure you would agree to fact that over the years, we have seen many technology trends have come and gone and many have stayed also, If you see your own enterprise architecture then you will see you have many asset left behind due to these technology trend, now these asset are living in silos and providing some benefit to organisation. Digitization idea begins with mechanism to integrate together these assets in a meaningful way, which can create digital moment for customer and provide value to customer.

Digital Transformation is just not about the simple transformation of business assets into digital versions, it’s about actually doing something with those digitized assets also Digital transformation is not just about one technology, but about multiple digital assets that were never designed to work together and making them work.

If we see above points then we can understand that holistic integration solution is a prerequisite for any digital transformation solution.

How to define Integration strategy for Digital solution: When we are defining integration strategy then we should make sure it is compasses with multiple aspects, what are these aspects?

  1. Disciplines and Domains - In terms of Integration, we need to make sure our Integration strategy covers all the disciplines, for example A2A, B2B, Data and process scenarios.In the past everything was predominantly on premise, it was found that you had dedicated technologies that address each of these integration domains but now with more and more cloud applications and customers adopting more and more cloud solutions you seen that the lines are blurring between these different domains  so you need to have an integration strategy which is holistic enough to address these various domains of integrations as well.

  2. Endpoints - As we discussed each of these technology trends had left behind different assets which was prevalent for that particular technology trends which presented in the fact that you have to deal with different types of Endpoint that need to be brought together in a meaningful manner and when we talk about endpoints we are talking about application end point, cloud endpoint , mobile endpoint. Integration solution needs to consider all these endpoints and provide standard solution for these endpoints, Example of endpoints can be Devices, Mobile, Data source, SaaS applications

  3. Deployment models -  With evolution of cloud we need to make sure that our integration middleware that we pick across our solutions can be built in such a way that we deploy our integration content either on premise or on the cloud or even embedded within our application. We need to design our integration solution in such a way that we design once and deploy multiple times on multiple domains approach, so this is one of the important aspect of Integration strategy to understand integration solution deployment models Example On-Premise, On-Cloud

  4. Persona - In the past integration was kind of targeted for the hardcore techies who knew exactly what to do how to work with the tools and  understand complex interfaces and understand how the mapping should look like etc. If you see recent trends we don't have only developers which is using middleware solution we also have different business user who are interested in integration solution and wants to quickly configure Interface for their needs, so when we are designing our Integration strategy then we also needs to think about personas.  Examples: Developer, Business User


 

So, above was some highlights around why Integration is prime enabler for digital transformation and how should we design holistic integration solution which should cover above mentioned aspects.

In coming blogs, I would like to provide recommendation and solution from SAP to create holistic Integration strategy.
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