Build an Application Integration Strategy

Build an Application Integration Strategy

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  Info-Tech Research Group1 V3 Info-Tech Research Group, Inc. Is a global leader in providing IT research and advice. Info-Tech’s products and services combine actionable insight and relevant advice with ready-to-use tools and templates that cover the full spectrum of IT concerns. © 1997-2013 Info-Tech Research Group Inc.
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  Info-Tech Research Group2 Create a formal application integration (AI) strategy blueprint to improve success of IT projects and assert some control over today’s major IT disruptors. Introduction Organizations of any size who have a formal architecture in place or are transitioning to a formal architecture. Enterprise architects developing and implementing streamlined application communications with internal and external stakeholders. IT leaders managing systems that require real- time integration. AI specialists and architects responsible for technology and data access enablement. Business analysts needing to understand key AI concepts to work more effectively with IT. Understand the benefits and costs of AI. Review the current integration environment against future business and IT drivers to determine what integration technology components will be required. Define an integration architecture blueprint and periodically review and update it without compromising the foundation. Learn modern and trending architecture solutions. This Research Is Designed For: This Research Will Help You:
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  Info-Tech Research Group3 Follow the Info-Tech AI Roadmap Customer Service Strategy Build an Application Integration Strategy • This solution set will provide insight into how Application Integration (AI) can benefit an organization and provide faster time to value for application integration. • Choose the optimal integration method for each of your applications and learn how to plan implementation initiatives. Vendor Landscape: Application Integration Middleware • Gain insight into which vendor best aligns with your organization’s needs and which middleware solution will provide the most efficiency within your infrastructure. Vendor Landscape: Managed File Transfer • Managed file transfer secures and facilitates file transfer; it reduces risk and cost, increases reliability and visibility, and simplifies partner relationships. AI Strategy Implement and Optimize Application Integration Governance • The governance of AI is often overlooked when developing an AI framework. Determine what governance model is right for you to get the most out of your integrated apps and avoid headaches. You are Here!
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  Info-Tech Research Group4 Executive Summary 1. Involve the right stakeholders and get them to drive the AI blueprint initiative. Business buy-in is critical from the C- level down to the end user. Involving the business in strategy development will keep it engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives. 2. An architectural approach to AI strategy is critical to making appropriate technology decisions and promoting consistency across AI solutions through the use of common patterns. 3. Self-serve integration is available today. Get control of your AI environment with an appropriate architecture, including policies and procedures before end users start adding BYOI (bring-your-own- integration) capabilities to the office. Info-Tech Insight Develop your AI blueprint • Understand your current technical and business environments. • Develop an architectural vision with building blocks and patterns. • Perform a gap analysis between current environment and future vision. • Plan for AI implementation within your organizational constraints. • Manage the strategy through future technology and business environment changes. Make the case for AI in your organization • Well-defined business drivers will result in a business focused development of your AI blueprint. • Involve all key business stakeholders in business driver and AI blueprint development to triple your chances of success. • Right-size the business case within the characteristics of your organizational boundaries. Understand the importance of AI in today’s IT environment • Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more sophisticated integration tooling. • Organizations with a formal AI strategy doubled their AI success rate. • Ad hoc AI approaches result in point solutions, overlaps in technology capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; and the correlation between business drivers and technical solutions is lost.
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  Info-Tech Research Group5 How to use this blueprint We recommend that you supplement the Best Practices Blueprint with a Guided Implementation. For most Info-Tech members, these Guided Implementations are included in your membership plan.* Our expert analysts will provide telephone assistance to you and your team at key project milestones to review your materials, answer your questions, and explain our methodology. Info-Tech Research Group’s expert analysts will come onsite to help you work through our project methodology in a 2-5 day project accelerator workshop. We take you through every phase of the project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully. In some cases, we can even complete the project while we are onsite. Do-It-Yourself Implementation Use this Best Practice Blueprint to help you complete your project. The slides in this Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use. Project Accelerator Workshop You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix. Book your workshop now by emailing: WorkshopBooking@InfoTech.com Best Practice Blueprint Free Guided Implementation Onsite Workshops *Gold and Silver level subscribers only Or calling: 1-888-670-8889 Ext. 3001 There are multiple ways you can use this Info-Tech Best Practice Blueprint in your organization. Choose the option that best fits your needs:
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  Info-Tech Research Group6 Book a free guided implementation today! Info-Tech is just a phone call away and can assist you with your project. Our expert Analysts can guide you to successful project completion. For most members, this service is available at no additional cost.* Here’s how it works: 1. Enroll in a Guided Implementation for your project Send an email to GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com Or call 1-888-670-8889 and ask for the Guided Implementation Coordinator. 2. Book your analyst meetings Once you are enrolled in a Guided Implementation, our analysts will reach out to book a series of milestone-related telephone meetings with you and your team. 3. Get advice from a subject matter expert At each Guided Implementation point, our Consulting Analyst will review your completed deliverables with you, answer any of your questions, and work with you to plan out your next phase. *Gold and Silver level subscribers only This symbol signifies when you’ve reached a Guided Implementation point in your project.
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  Info-Tech Research Group7 When we introduce new Blueprints, we offer workshops to our members at no charge for a short beta testing period. Please check the Workshop section of our website for a list of free beta workshops. Book a workshop today! An Info-Tech project accelerator workshop will help you to engage your stakeholders, gather important data, make key decisions, and generate a customized project road map. Here’s how it works: 1. Enroll in a 2-5 day workshop for your project Send an email to WorkshopBooking@InfoTech.com or call 1-888-670-8889 Ext. 3001. Your account manager will contact you and quote you the cost of a workshop. 2. Book your workshop A Workshop Coordinator will contact you to book a workshop planning call with one of our Facilitators and arrange dates for your workshop. We can hold the workshop in Info-Tech’s world-class facility in Toronto or at your location. 3. Plan your workshop A Workshop Facilitator will contact you to go over the workshop outline and choose the contents that are appropriate to your situation. 4. Participate in your workshop Our experienced Workshop Facilitators will take your project team through your tailored slides and exercises and will summarize all the workshop outputs into a final report. Free Beta Workshops
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  Info-Tech Research Group8 Guided Implementation points in the Application Integration project Book a Guided Implementation Today: Info-Tech is just a phone call away and can assist you with your project. Our expert Analysts can guide you to successful project completion. Here are the suggested Guided Implementation points in the Application Integration project: Section 1: Identifying business drivers for application integration Get off to a productive start: Uncover business drivers for integration. Identify risks and issues, along with mitigation plans to help bolster the program, and define KPIs that will be used to measure the success of the program. Section 2: Interpret the AI readiness assessment results and service inventory Interpret your organization’s AI readiness assessment results. Identify gaps that will need to be addressed in people, process, and technology as a vision and plan is developed. Section 3: Evaluating the vision and patterns identification Validate the requirements and architectural vision, and identify common integration patterns that will accelerate implementation and promote consistency across the environment. Validate architectural building blocks that will be required in the target environment. Section 5: Developing the AI strategic plan Validate the gap analysis, initiative composition, and strategic plan. Understand the resourcing requirements and constraints. To enroll, send an email to GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com or call 1-888-670-8889 and ask for the Guided Implementation Coordinator. This symbol signifies when you’ve reached a Guided Implementation point in your project.
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  Info-Tech Research Group9 Create a blueprint from a business driven application integration strategy  An overview of the primary elements and their relationships to each other, including applications, middleware, data, users, and external systems.  A definition of principles, policies, and guidelines that will influence the architecture development and implementation.  A definition of standards that will apply to the technologies that will be used to implement the architecture.  Alignment of business drivers with technology decisions.  A set of common patterns and templates that can be used for consistent integration solution design. An architecture blueprint has the governing ideas and candidate building blocks of an IT system, including: Business Drivers • Existing AI practises • Current KPIs/Benchmarks • IT inventory o Applications o Services o Legacy systems o Data environment o APIs o Staff A blueprint is the collection of all the work, planning, and investments completed during strategy development. • Architecture plan • List of business drivers • List of IT drivers • List of technologies o Middleware o APIs o Storage and servers • Patterns used • Scenarios used • List of gaps to enable future o People (AI specialist/architect) o Process (SOA, BPM, EA, etc.) o Technology (Middleware, etc.) • List of potential vendors • List of necessary evaluations • Proof-of-concepts • List of strategic initiatives o Training o Solution procurement • List of dependencies • List of constraints • Roadmap The patterns that we had developed were pretty generic and they could be adapted to the new distributed applications as well as the mainframe applications...where the new process made it so [the distributed and mainframe applications] could exist at the same time. - Manager IT Application Technology, Aviation Industry
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  Info-Tech Research Group10 Use the blueprint to formally document the AI strategy, to increase your AI success Formalized AI strategies consider business drivers and the involvement of all key stakeholders at every phase. Deviating away from a formal strategy increases the risk of incomplete or ineffective initiatives. An ad hoc integration approach is risky and costly because: • Solutions will become unaligned with business drivers. • Costs accumulate with “re-invent the wheel” initiatives every time there is a new application, AI requirement, or solution. • Inconsistent solution designs cost more to maintain and support. • Lack of ownership of integration components results in finger pointing when issues arise. An Info-Tech survey defined “Ad Hoc Approach” and “Formal Strategy” as the following: Ad Hoc Approach: Respondent selected “We don’t do this at all,” “Ad hoc approach; sometimes applied,” or “Ad hoc approach; usually applied.” Formal Strategy: Respondent selected “Standard process applied” or “Documented and managed process applied.” 27% 60% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Ad Hoc Approach Formal Strategy AISuccess(%) AI Success Rate: Ad Hoc Approach vs. Formal Strategy Survey: Info-Tech Research Group; N = 72 Those who had a formal AI strategy doubled their success rate. Take the necessary steps to create a formal AI strategy. 122% Increase
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  Info-Tech Research Group11 AI specialists have had to adopt new strategies and abandon point-to-point integrations due to cloud, social integration, mobile, and big data disruptors. Relying on hand coding and point-to-point integrations won’t cut it anymore; give IT the strategy and tools they need • Point-to-point integrations involving multiple solutions make it difficult for the operations team to track down the source of the problem. This obviously results in increased troubleshooting costs, which over time can grow to be greater than the cost of designing an AI strategy. • IT wastes resources resolving issues and gets caught in the middle when something goes wrong with the integration of applications. In many cases it is the business (i.e. end users) that are the source of the problem when no integration strategy is present. • With no formal integration strategy, IT will not have control over their integration solutions and will continue to lose ground to more innovative end-user options, such as consumerized applications. End users may resort to these options without IT consent, increasing security risks. • Multiple interface protocols • Multiple message formats • Routing and distribution of data • Security at endpoints and in transit • Privacy • Audit and logging • Multiple integration frequencies Ad hoc AI approaches increase complexity in the following areas: Don't believe anybody that tells you there is a single solution. We spent lots of effort trying to go there...but there isn't a single tool that does everything. There are plenty of vendors that will tell you their tool does everything, but it is not true. – Manager IT Application Technology, Aviation Industry AI tools are not add-ons or one-size-fits-all solutions.
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  Info-Tech Research Group12 Info-Tech Research Group Helps IT Professionals To: Sign up for free trial membership to get practical solutions for your IT challenges www.infotech.com  Quickly get up to speed with new technologies  Make the right technology purchasing decisions – fast  Deliver critical IT projects, on time and within budget  Manage business expectations  Justify IT spending and prove the value of IT  Train IT staff and effectively manage an IT department •“Info-Tech helps me to be proactive instead of reactive – a cardinal rule in a stable and leading edge IT environment. - ARCS Commercial Mortgage Co., LP Toll Free: 1-888-670-8889
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  Info-Tech Research Group13 Info-Tech Research Group Helps IT Professionals To: Sign up for free trial membership to get practical solutions for your IT challenges www.infotech.com  Quickly get up to speed with new technologies  Make the right technology purchasing decisions – fast  Deliver critical IT projects, on time and within budget  Manage business expectations  Justify IT spending and prove the value of IT  Train IT staff and effectively manage an IT department •“Info-Tech helps me to be proactive instead of reactive – a cardinal rule in a stable and leading edge IT environment. - ARCS Commercial Mortgage Co., LP Toll Free: 1-888-670-8889 Click to learn more about how Info-Tech can help your organization.