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Integration Maturity Model: Turning a Burden into an Advantage

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The Integration Maturity Model

The Burden: Integration

First, consider what’s occurred in just the past few years. Integration has moved from point-to-point interfaces that addressed communication between one application and another using the technology “du jour.” Exchanges with other companies were formalized with standards such as EDI, but were largely managed independently from internal business processes. The need for interoperability led to the creation of standards to represent data (XML) and services (Web services). Still, applications exposed their own interfaces, though in a standard way. And more importantly, new applications were added to legacy ones too critical to replace. It’s no wonder Gartner estimates that, for 90% of new system implementations today, half of the cost is due to integration.

Integration Capability as Competitive Advantage

Today, integration capabilities are even more important because many opportunities lie outside of the organization’s boundaries – in cloud applications, mobile applications, and social networks.

Cloud applications propose a consumption model different from on-premise applications, while promising their functionalities can be available much faster. But this promise depends on tight integration with business processes, and for these integrations, data synchronization is not suffi cient. Real-time integration is required, just as it is for on-premise systems. When cloud applications are adopted to replace existing on-premise applications, integration is, again, critical to ensure a smooth transition without business impact.

Mobile applications are growing in popularity and effectiveness because they offer a user-preferred, channel to engage and collaborate with customers, partners, and employees. The expectation for the channel is that it will have a rich and connected experience, and therefore deliver business value by exposing systems for an enhanced ecosystem. A robust and secure API is needed that can guarantee availability of services – even though internal systems were not designed to manage the increased number of requests.

Social networks provide a very powerful source of information, a way to interact with customers – and hopefully a way to turn them into fans. Customers reveal information that can be used to build a more accurate profi le. A “like” or a negative opinion can infl uence others in the network. This information aggregated at scale makes social networks a powerful environment.

Your organization has been solving integration challenges since the day it fi rst realized it wanted two systems to exchange data. Back then, with just a few systems, it was easier. Now, with more capable and complex applications, and business object information scattered across the enterprise, you need better, more capable tools. Today, integration lies on the critical path for key business initiatives.

This paper sets out why this is the case, describes the essential integration capabilities needed today, and suggests a method for fi nding the integration capabilities your organization needs to turn a burden into an advantage.

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Coming back inside the boundaries of the organization, the volume and velocity of information is increasing:

•  Real-time events from multiple sources (applications, websites, mobile devices, and others) are captured and integrated in real time to identify situations of interest: cross-sell or upsell opportunities; issues with the customer experience; fraud, risk, security breaches; a service-level agreement (SLA) violation. When these higher-level business events can be propagated in real time, they can be used to trigger processes or notify business users.

•  Big-data implementations provide new insights, based on the quantity and diversity of information collected. These insights depend on data quality and timeliness. Good integration ensures the latest facts are taken into account at the time of analysis. When insight is available, it can be fed back into applications, making the organization truly adaptable.

The Value of the Integration Platform

Integration platforms built on real-time messaging tackle all these cost and complexity issues. They decouple applications, while sharing information from various sources; using a bus architecture ensures high availability and scalability. In service-oriented architectures, integration platforms are essential. They expose some applications (those not service ready) as a set of reusable services and orchestrate them into net-new services, the building blocks for automated business processes or composite applications. Integration platforms can also generate and capture real-time events from applications and technologies such as RFID, further broadening organizational capabilities.

Organizations that have used integration platforms to add new systems and eliminate others, have been able to incrementally connect most of their systems. These organizations have gained increasing value from the platform as the cost of implementing and maintaining integrations decreases. Value also comes from real-time availability of information, faster processing, additional services for customers, and increased business visibility. Beyond technology, these organizations have built an integration capability.

By 2018, more than 50% of the cost of implementing 90% of new large systems will be spent on integration. — Gartner Predicts 2013: Application Integration

Turning a Burden inTo an advanTage

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Why Are Some Organizations More Successful?

Most organizations have several types of integration and various levels of adoption. So what makes some companies more successful than others, better able to leverage mobile, cloud, or big data initiatives? What are the critical technological, organizational, and strategic aspects that need to be addressed to decrease integration costs, reduce time to market, and turn integration into a business enablement capability?

To help you find out, TIBCO has tapped into our more than 20 years of experience implementing more than 3,500 infrastructures to create a simple approach to help you assess your integration capabilities and compare them to best practices. We call it the Integration Maturity Model, an interactive tool with a set of questions addressing key aspects of integration. The tool will help you assess and determine:

•  The needs for integration in your organization.

•  Which of those needs your organization is fulfilling today.

•  How well your organization fulfills its needs compared to industry best practices.

•  The capabilities your organization needs to improve integration.

In your organization, what does it take to turn a burden into an advantage? What does it take to become a leader that can enable business initiatives and increase business visibility?

Find out. Contact us to take the Integration Maturity Model assessment.

Turning a Burden inTo an advanTage

TiBCo Software inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. Whether it’s efficient claims or trade processing, cross-selling products based on real-time customer behavior, or averting a crisis before it happens, TIBCO provides companies the two-second advantage® – the ability to capture the right information, at the right time and act on it preemptively for a competitive advantage. More than 4,000 customers worldwide rely on TIBCO to manage information, decisions, processes and applications in real time. Learn more at www.tibco.com.

© 2013, TIBCO Software Inc. All rights reserved. TIBCO, and the TIBCO logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

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