Many integration centers are struggling to get fast and safe integrations with maintained control. The challenge is often tied to large organizations and enterprises with central service as common ground. In the middle of this - is you, with the role of an IT integration manager. Your main problem is to understand why you’re struggling, both with your integration landscape and with your constant headaches.
Todays’ central service delivery of integrations is slowly, but surely, turning your integration landscape non-agile. You’ve already noticed it. It usually starts with:
- Increased demands from businesses
There’s a growing number of requests for integrations. Everyone wants access to the data. - More customers and/or users
Your customer and/or user base are growing. More customers equal a larger number of integrations and a higher amount of data flow. - Demand for better, faster, and more advanced features
On top of this, your customers, external business partners, and your internal ecosystem want to improve and stay ahead.
What happens? The fast-paced developers in larger organizations and enterprises are tired of waiting to get their integrations done. And it’s usually difficult and time-consuming to do it. What do they do? They take action and start to develop their solutions to cut the queue and work around the bottleneck.
A.k.a. Go rogue 🥷
This leads to a lack of control and security. No one knows what the integration landscape looks like. What’s integrated and how the information flows. It also creates silos of non-reusable services which certainly will make you develop the same service, twice. As you probably can understand it quickly becomes a bottleneck with you as an IT integration manager in the middle of it. If this doesn’t give you a headache, nothing will. The question is - how do you solve it?
Listen to the need of your developers
First of all, you need to create the conditions your developers want and need. Where their data is available and easy to find, reuse, and self-serve. In that way, you’ve paved the way for speed and synergy between your teams, which in the end enables your developers to quickly and easily find the data they need to develop their applications.
One portal to rule them all
The ideal is to create one portal where these information services can be published. With a self-service portal, such as Starlify, you enable the integration center to provide the integration capabilities needed e.g. API’s, Event streaming, and so on. The developers should only have one interface that presents all of the applications and services that are in use and already developed. Preferably in the form of catalogs and overviews where each team is responsible for their published services and integration of consumers with other services. It creates an overview and simplicity for the developer and reduces the risk of developing the same thing over and over again.
The integration center is also required to ensure that the capabilities it provides include the right security, governance, policies, and ways of integration recommended by the company. In this way, you reduce the risk of teams becoming silos and developing their own solutions. And you maintain a healthy level of control without any bottleneck effects in your integration projects.
With a self-service mindset, you’re ready to meet the demands for better, faster, and more advanced features from both your customers and your internal and external developers. This saves you time and resources to use on other things, and you’re no longer the bottleneck with a constant headache.
Summary
With a larger number of integrations, which must be done in a shorter amount of time - for a larger number of applications and services, you end up with an integration landscape that looks ball of yarn. No one knows what’s in it, how it flows, and how to solve it. But with a shift towards a self-service portal, you can avoid the bottleneck that’s slowly getting created and get a much faster development and synergy with continued high security.