The business benefits of enterprise integration
Optimizing and automating business processes
Customers and employees expect a personalized and seamless experience across multiple digital touchpoints. By optimizing and automating fragmented internal business processes, businesses are simultaneously providing compelling customer experiences.
Delivering customer insight
Market leaders today must leverage data from inside and outside their organizations to anticipate customer needs and preferences. Organizations can gain a 360-degree understanding of their customers and audiences to increase loyalty and grow their competitive advantage.
Designing a futureproof IT landscape
A successful digital strategy often requires extending legacy systems to support new business models. Cohesive this solutions can unlock the value of your existing investments with an API-first approach.
Enabling the API economy
Companies are embracing APIs to unlock unique services and create new business models for a competitive advantage. These companies are able to drive these economies within and beyond their immediate organizational boundaries by leveraging digital channels to build a surrounding ecosystem of buyers, partners, and suppliers.
Best practices in enterprise integration
- Start with a platform approach. A platform-based approach supports the multiple dimensions of enterprise connectivity, catering to a wide range of integration use cases (such as application, process, data, usage, sensors, and others) across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid ecosystems.
- Use APIs as foundational building blocks. APIs serve as interchangeable integration components within a platform framework, supporting the integration of people, processes, and systems. This allows the business to easily transform digital assets into new business models through a variety of monetization plans.
- Make it accessible to everyone. By democratizing integration, the business can empower all users with intuitive, no-code build experiences. Business users of all backgrounds and technical capabilities can update and build integrations to help maximize business value, lessening the reliance on dedicated developers.
- Implement smart lifecycle management. Create ongoing management plans to support the enterprise integration strategy. Plans must include access control, change management processes, rules for extending integrations, management of system credentials, and data encryption. For hybrid deployments, lifecycle management must be able to push patches and upgrades to runtime engines whether on-premise or in the cloud.
- Drive continual improvements with analytics and predictive intelligence. Use integration activity analytics to draw insights from the flow of data across the business, departments, and endpoints. With increases in user-led integration, predictive intelligence can recognize integration patterns on usage across the organization.
- Establish an integration center of excellence (ICoE). An integration center of excellence (ICoE), also known as an integration competency center (ICC), is a shared service within an organization that methodically integrates data, system, cloud, and enterprise applications in a coherent, scalable, and cost-effective way to deliver an enduring competitive advantage. As a centralized function disseminating knowledge and standardizing processes across the organization, the ICoE’s role is to promote enterprise integration as a formal discipline. ICC’s yield multiple benefits to the business including reduced infrastructure and data center costs, sustainable growth, greater supply chain stability, intelligent technologies and predictive analytics for enhanced decision-making, smarter processes automation, and much more.
Source: SAP Insights
