What are the benefits of system integration strategies?

Strategic integrations promote business agility

The modern large-scale enterprise runs on thousands of solutions, applications and systems. Each piece has a crucial role to play in building a viable business framework. Yet, as organizations accumulate systems on-premises and in the cloud, the challenges grow — sometimes exponentially. Connecting, operating and managing a haphazard mix of resources becomes increasingly difficult. Operational roadblocks, customer experience failures and missed market opportunities often ensue.

It isn’t unlike a sprawling city. Without traffic lights, designated lanes, crosswalks and zoning controls, things can quickly spiral out of control. Just as thoughtful planning and a focus on coordinating various resources results in a better city, strategic integration leads to a better enterprise. Lacking it, an organization typically struggles with higher IT costs, business underperformance and greater risks associated with regulatory compliance and cybersecurity. Over time, an organization may struggle to innovate and reinvent the business.

A strategic integration fabric reduces the need to make changes on an application-by-application basis. Integrations are no longer one-off projects that, over time, lead to underperformance and technical debt. Within a tightly integrated fabric, organizations can use resources effectively and everything takes place within the context of business and IT requirements. It’s possible to use — and more importantly reuse — APIs, software components and other solutions. This “building block” methodology supports maximum digital agility, flexibility and scalability.

Current approach: Reinvent the wheel

A conventional approach to integration is highly ineffective. While each application or service delivers new and powerful capabilities, the long-term result can be complexity and, at worst, complete disorder. A system from 2002 doesn’t interact well with a system from 2024. Another application from 2014 makes things even more difficult. Soon, coding requirements, API integration and various fixes can grow beyond manageable limits. Often, an organization finds itself bogged down by slow and costly IT implementations that underperform and limit innovation.

Over time, the problem grows worse. As an organization evolves from a legacy technology stack to cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), more and more services accumulate — along with containers, microservices and APIs. Not only is it more difficult to configure new applications, but strategic drift also takes place. In the end, the enterprise winds up sacrificing highly desirable features and capabilities — and it’s unable to realize the maximum value from its IT investments.

This technical debt — and the need to upskill teams to deal with constant adjustments and wholesale changes — can take a toll. Innovation lags and, eventually, the organization can begin losing its competitive edge.

The better way

A strategic integration fabric flips the equation. This unified platform — think of it as a central nervous system for system integration initiatives — can help trim costs, reduce technical debt and unlock opportunities for real-world business process transformation. These tactical and strategic gains are possible because countless disconnected and discrete steps and processes disappear. Instead, a single interconnected digital fabric spans applications, systems and technology platforms. It can simplify and automate tasks.

The integration fabric provides a library of modular components — APIs and software solutions — that can be assembled and redeployed for various applications. This reduces redundant development efforts and accelerates innovation. In practical terms, the same APIs and components that made one project successful are quickly and easily applied to another — and another. The same technology stack used to build a commerce website or portal, for instance can go straight into a mobile app.

Once this fabric is in place, your organization can plug in new and improved services on demand — and have them up and running within days, rather than weeks or months. Yet the value of this methodology extends further. As business affiliates and others in a value chain migrate to this more advanced integration platform, the same core APIs can be used to automate and orchestrate processes and workflows across companies.

Consider how a financial services company found itself hindered by disparate legacy systems. This made it difficult to support shared services, connected workflows and advanced automation.

PwC helped modernize its IT platform to treat data, applications and infrastructure as a broad ecosystem. This included collapsing more custom integrations into a single API and building an integration platform that supports real-time enterprise insight.

What it looks like

Getting to a digitally integrated framework involves six key components.

• Diagnostics: An analysis framework identifies maturity areas, gaps and methods for bridging them. It focuses on a process known as a capability maturity assessment, a vendor assessment and business case development. The process produces a roadmap that corresponds to an organization’s desired direction and value drivers.
  
• Strategy: It’s critical to align the overall organization through a strategic vision and business case. Arriving at an integration fabric requires a clear integration and data strategy, an integration operating model and a core set of APIs that enable modularity, flexibility and agility.
  
• Blueprinting: Translating ideas and concepts into reality is at the heart of an effective initiative. This step identifies a technical direction, definable integration architecture and operating model, including API management. It also addresses data governance.
  
• Enablement: Maximizing the value of a strategic integration fabric requires an enterprise to have key structural components in place. This includes a center of excellence (CoE), an integration workforce planning framework, an operational planning and design plan, and an API adoption plan.
  
• Implementation: Integration at scale can take place only when all the various pieces are in place — and when everything’s been thoroughly tested and piloted. At this point, there’s coordination across major enterprise applications and managed services.
  
• Operation: Once implemented, the team isn’t done. Operation requires as much rigor as in the other five components, especially in monitoring costs and benefits. Example metrics include accounting for uptime, security, reuse of existing APIs and connections, anticipating and being ready for further growth, and automating the creation of any additional APIs.
  

The result is a systems integration fabric that evolves with your organization’s needs, a system that’s tightly synced with the enterprise vision, mission and business strategy. By decoupling the architecture from specific technologies — and the restrictions they present — it’s possible to achieve real-time integration across legacy systems, cloud microservices and other factors. The result is lower total cost of ownership and improved revenue opportunities.

What’s next?

The inherent complexity associated with managing applications, services and components isn’t going to vanish anytime soon. Today’s CIOs and other business leaders should cope with a dizzying array of technologies that stretch across legacy systems and modern multi-cloud environments. Yet the right middleware platform, API framework and solutions can organize the chaos by creating a strategic digital integration fabric that’s built to keep up with today’s rapidly changing business environment.

Working with PwC to help map and engineer a modern IT framework, it’s possible to add, change and subtract applications and various services without incurring hits to performance or costs. Legacy point-to-point connections disappear, and end-of-life product issues fade into the background. An organization adopts unified and consistent standards that extend to new projects, including areas like AI and automation. There’s another less obvious benefit — the need to constantly upskill your staff goes away.

How to get started

Modernizing and streamlining an integration framework doesn’t have to devolve into an exercise in frustration, complexity and high costs. Experience combined with an industry-leading methodology and high-quality solutions can deliver a superior platform for enterprise systems integration. What’s more, it’s a framework that doesn’t require constant reworking and revamping — and it can help unlock business value.

PwC uses a factory model approach that can automate complex tasks ranging from scope alignment and architectural modeling to testing and integration at scale. Systems engineers and business specialists draw on specific experience from specialized digital integration providers that are tuned into specific industry verticals and operational use cases. The result is a fast and effective transition to a modern strategic integration fabric that can unlock agility, accelerated innovation and tangible business results. PwC even has a managed services capability to help operate your organization’s integration platform once it has launched.