CIO Call to Action: Shake Up Your Integration Strategy to Enable Digital Transformation

On November 26, 2015 Benoit Lheureux, Keith Guttridge and I published this research, which is a call to action for CIOs: They have to rethink their integration strategy if the are to succeed with their digital transformation strategy. A move toward do-it-yourself, self-service pervasive integration carried out by specialists and nonspecialists - including LoB developers, SaaS administrators, data analysts and business users - is imperative to support strategies such as digital business, bimodal IT, post-modern ERP and  analytics. The research also features two notable case studies from Eni and Adobe.

Below a summary of the main findings. Enjoy!

What's Going On:

• Integration can be a source of competitive differentiation and an enabler for bimodal IT, but most CIOs have yet to recognize that their traditional, established integration strategies cannot cope with digitalization's fast technology innovation and accelerated pace of business.

• The separation between application, data, B2B, cloud service, mobile app and IoT integration technologies and skills is unsustainable. Most new projects must tackle a mix of these issues.

• Pervasive, "good enough" do-it-yourself (DIY) integration by LOBs and business users is needed for Mode 2 agility. Enabling tools are widely available, but DIY integration poses governance, security, compliance and cultural challenges, and introduces technical debt risks.

• New providers targeting DIY integration defy the status quo. Integration technology from traditional players is no longer the safest choice and may harm short-term productivity.

What Should You Do:

• Make the re-envisioning of your integration strategy a top priority, because a holistic, pervasive and "low touch" bimodal integration approach is an entry ticket to the digital era.

• Encourage and enable DIY integration by setting up support and guardrails for nonspecialists in integration through a "facilitation team" that complements the fulfillment role of traditional centralized integration teams.

• Encourage and assist application development project leaders into a design-for-interoperability approach by pushing an API-first style supported by appropriate technology.

• Build up, incrementally, a hybrid integration platform (HIP) hat incorporates capabilities for integration specialists, LOB developers and business users in a self-service fashion.

• Select integration providers for your HIP pragmatically and with an open mind. Incumbent integration providers may not be ready and emerging players may not yet be enterprise-capable.

Find the full research here (Warning: You must be a Gartner client to access the document)