Today’s digital transformation is extending from the individual organization and into its ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers. To drive innovation and create new business opportunities, companies are partnering with vendors to provide services and products that support their digital transformation initiatives. These partnerships raise the stakes for organizations on how they design their systems integration architecture. The success of any service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation hinges on an organization’s ability to architect a system integration strategy that optimizes partner collaboration across all relevant stakeholders and technology stacks. To get started on designing an optimal system integration architecture, check out this best practices guide. It outlines a set of recommendations to effectively manage partner collaboration in support of your organization’s business objectives.
Establish Organizational Objectives
The first step to a successful SOA implementation is to clarify the organizational objectives. What are your business goals and how will they be achieved through system integration? What value will a successful implementation bring to your organization? Before you start designing the architecture, make sure you have a clear understanding of the organizational objectives. This will guide your decisions throughout the architecture design process and ensure that your system integration architecture is achieving the intended business outcomes.
Define Scope
Before you can build a strategy for system integration, you must first define the scope of your integration activities. What partners will you be working with and what services do they need to provide to support your organization’s objectives? What is the timeline for your strategy? How long do you anticipate this strategy will last? What are the considerations for extending the strategy beyond the initial phase? An effective system integration strategy starts with defining the scope of the integration activities. This includes the partners to work with, the services they will supply, and the services your organization will need to provide.
Define Responsibilities
As system integration activities get underway, it’s important to clarify the responsibilities for both the organization and its partners. What is each partner’s role in supporting your organization’s business objectives? What is your organization responsible for and what is the partner responsible for? As you design the system integration strategy, it’s important to outline the responsibilities for each partner. This will help you establish expectations and prevent unmet expectations from derailing the implementation. What governance and/or oversight mechanisms will be in place to ensure that partners are meeting their responsibilities? What mechanisms will partners use to communicate issues and/or problems they encounter?
Define Technology Stack
Given the critical role of technology in supporting any SOA implementation, you must first define the technology stack that will be used for system integration. What are the technologies that will be used for the integration strategy? How does the technology stack support your organization’s objectives? What technology components are required to support your integration strategy? What vendors are providing the technology components? As you define the technology stack for system integration, it’s important to understand the integration requirements for each partner. This will help you determine the technology components of your stack that must be procured from external vendors. What protocols, interfaces, and other technical elements will be used to support the integration activities? How will these technologies be used to connect and interoperate with the technology components of your stack?
Establish a Service Management Strategy
As system integration activities get underway, organizations will often implement Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) to manage service delivery from their partners. What metrics will be used to determine if partners are meeting expectations? What penalties will be applied if partners fall below expectations? What mechanisms will be in place to help partners identify and resolve issues that may arise? What tools will be used to manage and track the service lifecycle for each service? As you design the system integration strategy, it’s important to define the metrics for managing services from partners. This will help you establish expectations and define penalties for falling below expectations. It also provides insight into the type of infrastructure that will be required to manage services. What mechanisms will be in place to help partners identify and resolve issues that may arise? What tools will be used to manage and track the service lifecycle for each service?
Establish Quality Assurance Strategies
As system integration activities get underway, organizations will often implement Quality Control metrics to ensure that partner services are meeting expectations. What metrics will be used to identify and remediate quality issues? What metrics will be used to identify areas of improvement? What processes will be used to manage quality issues from partners? What metrics will be used to identify and address quality issues? How will these metrics be communicated and tracked? As you design the system integration strategy, it’s important to define the metrics for quality assurance. This will help you identify and remediate quality issues with partner services. It will also help you identify areas of improvement and strengthen the services being provided by partners. What processes will be in place to manage quality issues from partners? What metrics will be used to identify and address quality issues? How will these metrics be communicated and tracked?
Conclusion
The success of a system integration strategy hinges on defining the partners to work with, the services they will provide, and the technologies that will be used to connect and interoperate. An effective strategy also requires an organizational assessment of its objectives, responsibilities, and technology stack. With these elements in place, organizations can design an optimal system integration architecture that drives business transformation through partner collaboration.