PACE.ENABLEMENT

Enable the next step in your Integration success story with one of our tailored packages setting your organisation up for future growth. From strategy to capability, have a read of how PACE can empower you and your team.

INTEGRATION STRATEGY JUMPSTART

Leading industry analysts have recognised the key role integration will play in enabling digital businesses in the connected world. Alongside the need for traditional systems integration the prominence of mobile and Internet of Things means there will continue to be an exponential growth in connections requiring seamless integration.

Even organisations with a well-established integration strategy are facing the challenge of adapting to an accelerated business which is driving requirements for the use of SaaS integration and APIs for mobility.

With this PACE enablement package, accelerate your strategy definition with a clear framework that will understand drivers in your wider digital and IT strategies and how these coupled with business objectives map to your integration requirements. These requirements not only drive technology platforms and patterns but an understanding of organisation, governance and project implications.

From the Integration Strategy jumpstart you can expect to not only understand what the gap is between existing capabilities and your newly defined strategy, but also how to take the next steps in realising that strategy.

Our framework for success is based on proven experience and industry best practice models.

Make updating your Integration Strategy a top priority to allow you to keep PACE with the industry trends, and enable digital growth.

ESTABLISH YOUR INTEGRATION COMPETENCY

The role of competency centres is changing as different dev-ops models and promotion of self-service integration are driven by the need for speed, agility and innovation. But whether you have a centralised or federated organisation then there is still a strong need for providing leading integration expertise to teams across business platforms.

There is not a one-size fits all approach though to how to the engagement with your integration competency should be managed; for instance supporting requirements in integrating systems of record requires a different level of governance to that of a project trialling a new experience mobile app.

The traditional integration CoE previously looked to build a central team of experts to whom the whole organisation would look for any of their integration needs. This has distinct advantages around sharing knowledge capital and providing well governed processes to manage pipeline. However the distinct disadvantage is in the creation of a single bottleneck as ultimately it limits decisions to a core group of individuals. When development timeframes are required in hours rather than days, weeks and months this approach on it's own is not scalable.

However the other extreme of just letting platforms to their own thing is not workable, and leads to security issues, wasted effort, increased costs, and a lack of cohesion between the business platforms.

A balance should be found that, similar to multi-modal delivery, is able to adjust to the set of requirements driving the demand. The modern integration competency centre should provide guidance through establishing a scalable framework for success rather than applying rigid processes regardless of the need.

So whether you have an existing competency centre or are looking to setup greenfield we can work with you to structure a team that meets your organisations wider business platform needs.

Organisation Structure, Skills & Recruitment - understand the existing integration and wider organisation. Document the high-level skills profiles currently available, and where any gaps exist agree the preferred option for recruitment.

Catalogue Services - define what services your competency currently offers IT and the business, and which services it will offer in the future.

Roles and Responsibilities - deliver updated responsibilities of your own team as well as all the parties that interact with your team

Guideline for Engagement - document scenarios of the potential demand, and produce a guideline that articulates the level of engagement required with the competency centre in given scenarios - this will assess certain factors to determine the level of governance.

Self-Service Roadmap - understand what frameworks, policies, guides, standards are required to support your integration competency in enabling the business platforms to be self-sufficient.

Showcase the new Competency Centre - promote the new competency centre with stakeholders and consumers alike. In our experience the cultural change is often the most difficult to manage within the organisation, so it's important to emphasise how this makes their lives easier.

PACE has the experience to help you on this journey in establishing a team that not only excels at the existing, but is setup to empower the business platforms whilst protecting the wider enterprise.

MANAGE A MULTI-MODAL CAPABILITY

Have you recently expanded your integration capabilities (e.g. API) and looking to bring end to end synergies? Would you like your traditional on-premise, ESB teams and modernised iPaaS and API products to work in a more cohesive way?

We can assist you in addressing this crucial tension point within Hybrid IT by establishing your Integration capability to operate in the appropriate mode, selected based on the business requirement. Being adaptable is critical to keep pace with business drivers, and our service will also help you establish clear light governance between different operating modes to function as one integration capability.

Setting up separate teams to deliver on these different requirements might seem like the obvious answer, but ultimately they will need to cooperate and collaborate to achieve their goals, and avoid inefficiencies. Working seamlessly as one team to deliver and operate hybrid solutions is critical to an organisations ability to embrace the new whilst ensure the resilience in established platforms.

Our PACE service includes:

Baseline of Existing Capabilities - include existing delivery, operational challenges as well as foreseen cultural barriers to establishing your multi-modal capability.

Complete an Integration Blueprint - understand the business drivers and IT requirements for your integration capability needs, document gaps and agree a plan for action.

Establish Code of Practice - given the different approaches to delivery and operations between the modes, it is important to define the ways of working not only within the teams but between them so hybrid projects can be delivered and supported seamlessly.

Setup the Governance layers - whether it's reusing existing governance within the traditional Mode 1 delivery or establishing a new agile methodology for governance of Mode 2, it's also important to define shared governance and touch-points to ensure succeed as one team.

Define the Engagement Model - define how platforms within your organisation, external suppliers, vendors, customers, consumers all engage with your multi-modal Integration Capability.

Market the new Capability - promote the new capability with stakeholders and consumers alike. In our experience the cultural change is often the most difficult to manage within the organisation, so it's important to emphasise how this makes their lives easier.

Enhance your integration capability to be adaptable to the business need for speed and agility whilst providing resilience and security across the enterprise.

PLATFORM ENABLEMENT

You’ve defined your mission statement, and written your Integration Strategy, but now the challenge arises of how do you realise that strategy. One of the most daunting changes can be landing a new or upgraded integration system in the landscape.

Traditionally the establishment of a new technology or system migration always meant a long drawn out project requiring lots of resource and management. In the area of Enterprise Systems Integration these challenges are often emphasised as the platform orchestrates processes between multiple business critical applications and partners; so any change can have widespread impact.

Even with iPaaS solutions operating a subscription model, where there is no new infrastructure footprint to be managed internally, still present challenges in operating the new with the existing services in hybrid. Unless the scope is limited and outside of the core business, then considerations around data privacy unless thought through in advance, can result in delays negating benefits of the new service.

It’s often stated how embedding any new platform is not only about the technology but understanding how it fits into organisation, and defining processes required to govern its use. These of course are all very important but at PACE we also believe that the marketing of your new platform within your company is just as critical. It was from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams that the phrase “build it and they will come” originates, which may have been the case when IT dictated what technology to use, but now to ensure its adoption the business need to want to use your platform.

With this package PACE can accelerate the process of embedding new integration technology into your organisation. Whether it’s starting your journey with an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) provider, establishing a managed file transfer platform to replace unmanaged scripting or upgrading an existing on-premise technology then we can provide the benefit of experience and help you reduce the timeframe to realising the benefits.

Evaluate Business Case - when required we can assist in the development of a business case that can be presented to steering groups. This serves as a checkpoint on whether to proceed with the procurement and subsequent enablement activities.

Existing landscape Implication Assessment - understand the implications for existing technologies, teams and governance processes as a result of introducing the new platform.

Plan for Platform Enablement - engagement with stakeholders, and dependent IT teams for service introduction. Outline tasks, owners and timeframes, agreeing with all relevant parties.

Updated Integration Patterns - document the integration patterns to be used on the new platform, including any criteria for evaluating which of existing integration technologies to use for given business scenarios.

Asset Roadmap - understand the frameworks, policies, guides, standards that are required to gain consumer engagement for your new integration platform. It needs to be beneficial and simple for business platforms to utilise the service.

Marketing the new Platform - plan for showcasing the new platform, it's benefits, and it's relevance to the business drivers. This is aimed to promote adoption of the new platform to senior stakeholders, business operations and IT teams alike.

Why not connect today to learn how to accelerate the onboarding of your new integration platform and how to successful promote adoption by the wider business platforms.

INTEGRATION SOLUTION DESIGN

With the increasing prominence of Cloud and SaaS solutions operating in hybrid with existing on-premise systems the need to quickly, consistently and securely integrate data across the wider enterprise has never been more important.

Integration Solution Design provides the details on how processes and applications will interface in a secure and resilient manner – critical to de-risking and simplifying the build, test and deployment cycle.

Many Saas providers list as a differentiator for their solutions terms like 'packaged integration' and 'connects out the box', but the reality is whilst these can help with the technology, there are no magic answers to integrating processes that work for your business.

At PACE we believe, and have seen, that by investing time in the early phase of solution design and delivering clear end-to-end lightweight documentation, this function can not only clarify the technology aspects of how everything will flow together, but also highlight where further functional and product ownership is required. Even for agile delivery this not only saves time and resource but ultimately cost.

By completing your Integration Solution Design, you can:

Realise your companies wider integration strategy by bridging the gap between the enterprise architects and the project teams - governing any exceptions to protocol.
Balance project drivers of time & cost with need for reuse & future scalability.
Ensure speed of delivery by avoiding teams and projects operating in isolation.
Drive API and solution reuse.
Measure strategy compliance with visibility of project and business challenges, cataloged, that in turn can drive priorities for strategic enterprise architects.
Confirm upfront the security, connectivity, data, and operational implications on the overall solution.