Intelligent Integration Landscape Operating Model in 2021 – Part 1

BACKGROUND

It has been an intense year for all of us at work and home adjusting to the new normal and many of us are still on furlough!

Covid has left a profound impact and long standing debt on economies but humans have never made more progress on any disease in a year than the world did on COVID-19 this year. Under normal circumstances, creating a vaccine can take 10 years. This time, multiple vaccines were created in less than one year. According to Bill Gates, These breakthroughs will make world better in 2021 than 2020.

The same has been true with my team as well, we never made great progress on new certifications and building useful tools outside projects as we had always been on a tight spot on the delivery of cutting edge SAP Cloud projects within very aggressive time scales.

I want to congratulate my team for not only completing TOGAF, Open SAP, Mule soft, AWS certifications but also building a prototype that will help organizations to shift to a Intelligent Integration Operating Model and say cheers to Ramesh Parashivamurthy Umasairam Reddibathina Ram B for building the prototype that we are hoping to release next year.

As humans, we are continuously striving to be better every year and it is the same for the “Integration World”!

I want to share my thoughts on how we can build intelligent integration operating model in 2021 and make life easier for integration support teams.

INTRODUCTION

According to Gartner, The average business transaction now crosses 40+ different back-end systems, connecting new information and operationalizing it across the entire enterprise via API(S) can drive automation and process efficiency.

The right integration strategy allows organizations to cut complexity and drive tangible business value however IT teams often struggle to rally their organizations behind a new digital integration approach. A key reason for this is that we are not communicating the business value story of integration projects in a clear and compelling way that connects with the customer!

BIG ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM – DIGITAL TRANSFORMATON – INTEGRATION STRATEGY – IT PROJECT BUDGETS

TOP 7 CUSTOMER CHALLENGES

The explosion of 5G, container based deployment of apps, server less computing and IoT, Bigdata, Edge Computing has compounded the integration challenges for the customer as the integration now is not about connecting “apps” in a pre-defined network, “Integration is about connecting “anything” to “any other thing” deployed “anywhere” (space or earth or satellite or submarine) to seamlessly transfer ” any packet (messages, big data, streaming events etc)” to “any destination” without “any pre-defined boundaries”.

Whilst collaborating with customers to identify their pain point and shaping their data and integration strategy on ERP digital transformation projects , I have seen a consistent pattern of 7 challenges faced by customers summarized below:

1.Astronomical project costs to Integrate multiple cloud tools with complex on-premise legacy systems due to poor documentation of existing interfaces and lack of bird’s view of interfaces across landscape.

2.Unable to reap Interface reusability(API) ROI: Organizations have multiple cloud and digital projects kicked off with no central governance resulting in projects building redundant interfaces

3.No tools to assess process gaps in existing integration landscape to identify bottlenecks and modernize those interfaces that drive business value.

4.Lack of Ability to estimate the rom costs of the complexity and costs of upgrading middleware due to poor documentation and understanding of existing interface flows…Do you want to try convincing business to upgrade 200 interfaces from SAP PO to CPI for million dollars to unlock innovation value?

5.No automatic Integration assistant to select the right tool for multi-cloud integration

6.No Real time incident assignment & reporting when an error occurs based on interface criticality

7.Lack of Ability to analysing recurring integration error patterns across organizations , auto-learn from the errors and resolve issues

SOLUTION OBJECTIVE

The objective of the storyboard is to solve the above 7 challenges and build a Holistic Monitoring and Error Learning Framework that can be tailored to customer requirements for reporting errors into incident management systems using open connectors, recording interface meta data for all interfaces to promote re-usability , assess CR impacts and contact right teams to resolve the errors quickly, generating business friendly L1,L2,L3 operational dashboards, restarting messages.

The tool should provide following benefits to customer:

• Provides bird’s view of the customer integration landscape
• Provides ability for support teams to quickly assess the interface CR’s and implement the CR’s
• Provides support team ability to mitigate the risks of Interface Upgrades by providing an up to date bird’s view of all the interfaces in the customer landscape
• Provides ability for support teams to contact right teams and resolve errors quickly
• It provides metrics like Interfaces by Country, Interfaces by System, Interfaces by Business Criticality, Interfaces by Volume that helps organizations to reduce TCO and quantify which interfaces can bring business value when modernized in future
• Customizable Auto-restart and manual restart of messages
• Ability to create incidents on incident management systems or pro-active alert e-mails according to the customer’s choice of channel based on business criticality
• Provides ability to generate operational and performance dashboards that enables L1, L2, L3 Support Teams to make faster decisions for service improvements
• Provide ability to slice and dice the textual error logs using keyword tagging or text mining techniques to quickly identify the error root causes
• Provides ability to Enhance Monitoring Framework to suite Custom requirement ..Ex: No of auto-tries, raise incidents on Zendesk instead of JIRA or E-MAIL Alerts
  Support User Journeys
• The below table provides a snap shot of the Integration Support Team User Journeys that many customers are looking for improving in the future.

Support User Journeys

The below table provides a snap shot of the Integration Support Team User Journeys that many customers are looking for improving in the future.