Application integration as a business enabler for the government

Integrating backend applications has long been regarded as a necessary evil. To avoid data being stored in multiple places and thus needing to be synchronised, integration flows were established that ensured data could be stored in one place and shared with multiple applications. This increased efficiency, reduced costs, and provided immediate added value for functional users and management.
 
Integration ensures that valuable data reaches various functional groups within the same organisation or with parties collaborated with, across teams and departments. 

'Today, integration is viewed differently,' says Niek Jacobsen. 'Integration ensures that valuable data reaches various functional groups within the same organisation or with parties we collaborate with, across teams and departments. Moreover, integration enables organisations to work more efficiently with other parties, both internal and external. It also allows valuable data and business functionality to be used as building blocks for brainstorming and developing new innovative applications.'

In short, there are many advantages that functional users and management appreciate. Integration is therefore more than ever a business enabler today.

How does that work exactly? 'Where in the past the focus was mainly on the integration of backend applications, today there is a strong emphasis on exposing those backend systems to the outside world through standard interfaces,' says Niek Jacobsen. 'These often take the form of REST APIs.' Integration platforms are often used for exposing legacy backend systems. Thanks to their large number of connectors and extensive set of routing and transformation capabilities, these platforms can make the data and functionality within previously isolated systems available to other (modern) applications through easy-to-use REST APIs.

'To deploy integration as a business enabler, it is essential that organisations do this in a thoughtful and efficient manner. If this aspect does not receive sufficient attention, the organisation risks not only wasting time and money but also missing opportunities to respond to new developments.'

Source visual: From the State of Ecosystem and Application Integration Report (2019) by Cleo.

'Organizations need a well-founded integration strategy. They should think about their vision and goals: What do they wish to achieve? What objectives are there? Is there a vision for skills, processes, and technologies to reach these goals? What is the maturity in knowledge and experience in the various areas?’

All relevant questions that organizations should ask themselves. ‘Based on those goals, they can then determine which skills, processes, and technologies they need to achieve those goals.'

No matter how far organizations are in their integration vision, Anchr can help by conducting an integration maturity assessment. In such an assessment, we map out where the organization stands, what can be improved, and the steps that can be taken to achieve optimisations. It provides organizations with all the information they need to determine where they currently fall short. This way, they can develop an integration strategy that indicates in which people, technologies, and processes they need to invest to achieve their goals and thus realise their vision. The assessment can also be further extended with a Proof of Concept from an open or closed source integration solution, in which our Anchr consultants can also incorporate solutions from the Gartner quadrant.

Below are the steps in an assessment that can be followed:

• Step 1 - The analysis of your current situation
  During the Integration Maturity Assessment, Anchr analyses your current situation and determines the maturity level of your governmental organization in areas such as Integration Architecture, Integration Governance, Integration Requirements, Integration Development, Integration Testing, Integration Management (Ops), and Integration Strategy.
• Step 2 - Integration deliverable with concrete recommendations
  Based on the analysis, the Anchr consultants provide concrete recommendations so that you can achieve a higher maturity level for a specific domain. The added value? This allows for better alignment of the architecture with the business strategy, creating a faster and more reliable delivery to production, and gaining greater transparency for the delivery of internal and external teams. Moreover, it facilitates earlier risk mitigation and defect identification, simpler system & change control management, and a higher potential for reuse.

In short, do you find it quite a challenge to integrate new applications smoothly and correctly with your existing applications? Does your governmental organization lack staff with expertise to execute an integration smoothly, or are your integrations not cost-effective and consuming significant resources? Then Anchr is the partner you are looking for.

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