The Applications of the Future Will Be Founded on Democratized, Self-Service Integration
Published 31 January 2020 - ID G00465611 - 19 min read
In the “composable enterprise,” development and integration will be combined to enable ubiquitous assembly of customized application experiences. Application leaders must invest in enterprise-grade, multifunction and multipersona integration to benefit from this vision for the future of applications.
Overview
Impacts
- Transitioning to a composable enterprise will compel organizations to pervasively leverage integration and composition capabilities across a spectrum of IT and business personas and skills.
- Empowering a democratized, self-service approach to composition will require strategic investments not only in technology, but also in organizational and governance models.
Recommendations
As the application leader responsible for your organization’s application architecture, development, integration and platforms, you should:
- Secure strategic support and funding for democratized, self-service composition by making your business and IT leaders aware of the crucial business relevance of this approach.
- Justify related investments in technology platforms, organizational models and governance processes by placing them in the context of your organization’s business goals in terms of innovation, agility, insights and efficiency benefits.
- Build a fully self-service integration and composition platform using the Gartner Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) Capability Framework as a reference to ensure support for: (1) a variety of use cases, communication styles and protocols; (2) collaboration between IT and business personas; (3) multiple deployment models; and (4) composition of a wide range of application and data resources.
- Establish a business-oriented integration strategy empowerment team (ISET) focused on proactively and pervasively empowering self-service composition by dispensing guidelines, best practices, governance processes and support services to business and IT constituencies.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2022, 90% of the top 20 low-code application platform services (aPaaS) will include some integration, composition and orchestration capabilities.
By 2023, 80% of the top 10 integration platform services (iPaaS) will include some business user-oriented application development capabilities.
Analysis
The applications of the future will be assembled and composed by the people that actually use them. Gone are the days of statically defined application silos. A variety of personas — not only IT specialists, but also nontechnical business users — will build their own, highly focused applications by collaboratively composing predefined building blocks and tailor-made user experiences.
The technological and organizational borders between the application development, automation, integration and governance disciplines will blur and the relevant strategies will merge.
Each business community, team or even individual user within an organization will be able to construct their own customized, role- and person-specific “application experiences.” These will come via the composition of “mini applications” that we are calling “packaged business capabilities” or PBCs (see “Innovation Insight for Packaged Business Capabilities and Their Role in the Future Composable Enterprise”).
Central IT departments will govern a dynamic and evolving portfolio of well-defined, integration-ready and configurable PBCs, which could be:
- Provided by SaaS and application software vendors, as well as by nonconventional sources (for example, banks, insurance companies and public authorities), typically via online marketplaces.
- Developed from scratch by central IT and line of business (LOB) IT specialists.
- Implemented by IT specialists via orchestration and integration of traditional systems.
Different types of IT and business constituencies will leverage APIs and event channels to compose PBCs into their own, custom-assembled application experiences. These will also include a user experience layer to support access to the application functionality via a variety of “presentation environments,” for example, mobile apps, web applications, social and business networks, chatbots, and virtual private assistants. These application experiences will be created to reflect specific business responsibilities of roles and individuals. Gartner calls this setup “the composable enterprise” (see Note 1 and Figure 1).
Figure 1. Integration Technology Supports the Composition of Application Experiences
One of the key attributes of a composable enterprise is its ability to continuously mutate, in terms of new and evolving application experiences, to enable innovation and adjust business processes to changing conditions. These adjustments can take place at any level in the organization (enterprise, LOB, department, workgroup or even individual). Therefore, in a composable enterprise, business units and individual users are not just passive consumers of the application capabilities provided by central or LOB IT, they directly and proactively participate in the design and development of their application experiences.
To achieve this ubiquitous, constant adjustability and fluidity, the use of integration and composition technologies must be diffused across organizational boundaries, not only in IT departments and roles. It must be available to — and consumable by — not only highly IT-savvy individuals, but also business users with minimal IT skills.
This vision will not materialize overnight. It will require organizations to gradually, yet methodically transition to this future state from the current scenarios where applications are still “siloed monoliths” integrated through APIs, event channels and integration technologies (see “2020 Strategic Roadmap for the Future of Applications”).
For the foreseeable future, however, most organizations will manage a hybrid environment of applications based on PBCs, older applications that expose APIs and event channels (so that they can partly participate in composed application experiences), and other applications that will continue to operate in isolation.
Integration technology and delivery models will become essential to connect all the moving parts of the composable enterprise and to support the transition from the current setting. However, today’s highly skilled, integration-specialist-centric integration platforms and centralized, factory-style integration delivery models are not adequate to enable the new integration patterns and the wide range of IT and business personas that are expected to participate in the new setup.
Therefore, to set out on the journey toward the composable enterprise, organizations should strategically invest in building “democratized,” self-service integration capabilities, including technologies, organizational models and governance processes. This research aims at helping application leaders responsible for application architecture, development, integration and platforms to define a plan that identifies, designs and gradually delivers these capabilities.
Figure 2. Impacts and Top Recommendations for Application Leaders Responsible for Integration
Impacts and Recommendations
A Composable Enterprise Strategy Will Use Integration and Composition Capabilities Across a Spectrum of IT and Business Personas and Skills
The role of integration and composition technology in the composable enterprise paradigm will be pervasive, to support four primary scenarios (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Integration and Composition Technology’s Pervasive Role in the Composable Enterprise
These scenarios are characterized as follows:
- Native PBC composition: Construction of brand-new packaged business capabilities (see Note 2).
- Pseudo-PBC composition: Wrapping of traditional systems to make them look like packaged business capabilities (see Note 3).
- Application experience composition: Assembly of brand-new application experiences (see Note 4).
- “Legacy” integration: Connecting brand-new application experiences, or individual packaged business capabilities, with traditional systems (see Note 5).
To enable these scenarios, organizations will have to significantly invest to build up a portfolio of integration technologies, as well as the associated set of skills and organizational and governance models. As discussed, these capabilities need to be used not only by IT specialists, but also by nontechnical business users (including business process analysts, product managers, marketeers, customer support managers and data scientists). In this way, organizations can empower all of these constituencies to compose their own, personalized application experiences.
The early patterns will have:
- Central IT, application providers or other, nonconventional entities delivering collections of PBCs and preassembled user experiences to the LOBs.
- LOB IT teams simply distributing the applications to all users, or assembling subset/superset compositions of PBCs and added user experiences, separately for different roles and responsibilities within the LOB.
- Individual users using the LOB-assembled application experiences for their role, or further modifying some of the assemblies to their preferences and specific practices.
Many organizations (especially large ones) have already invested in integration capabilities to enable initiatives such as postmodern ERP, customer experience, employee experience, multichannel operations, digital workplace and API platforms. However, these investments were typically either focused on supporting specific projects, or were designed to enable IT specialists to perform integration work. Although technologies have gradually evolved to enable business roles willing to tackle basic integration needs in a self-service way, integration teams are currently not focused on empowering constituents with minimal IT skills.
Such empowerment implies a significant evolution of your technology platform and organizational models:
You must refocus your integration strategy to deliver self-service capabilities for the masses, which must be supported by proper organizational models.
The analogy could be with office productivity tools (spreadsheets, word processors, personal databases and the like). These are tools that are made available, in a self-service fashion, to large groups of employees within just about every organization on the planet. The IT department provides some training and support services, but business personas freely and creatively use these tools to do their job.
In a composable enterprise, IT and business users must have self-service access to integration and composition tools and should be allowed to use them freely and creatively to do their jobs, with central IT support and governance.
However, you know how difficult it is to obtain integration capabilities funding to support traditional scenarios. Justifying the investments needed to make the leap of enabling this democratized, self-service approach to integration may look to you like an impossible mission.
Therefore, to secure funding and strategic support from your organization’s business leaders, you must be able to link those investments not to abstract technical or architectural considerations (for example, “enabling the composable enterprise”), but to the organization’s business goals. In other words, by establishing an open and candid dialogue with the business leaders, you must over time build a “story” that articulates how self-service integration enables your organization to:
- Innovate (for example, by participating in business ecosystems/value chains or by developing new, continuously improving products, services and business models).
- Be more agile (for example, by quickly reconfiguring business processes to meet new needs or to address new target markets).
- Have greater situational awareness and insights (for example, in terms of dynamic visibility into business KPIs or ability to detect, in real time, anomalies in the business).
- Be more efficient and reduce costs (for example, by automating business processes and by reducing manual data entry errors).
Recommendations:
- Secure strategic support and funding for democratized, self-service composition by making your business and IT leaders aware of the crucial business relevance of this approach.
- Justify related investments in technology platforms, organizational models and governance processes by placing them in the context of your organization’s business goals in terms of innovation, agility, insights and efficiency benefits.
Empowering a Democratized, Self-Service Approach to Composition Will Require Strategic Investments Not Only in Technology, but Also in Organizational and Governance Models
The ultimate goal of a composable enterprise strategy is to boost innovation, agility, insights and efficiency by empowering both IT and business constituencies to perform the integration and composition work needed to implement their own differentiated application experiences (see Figure 4 and Note 6).
Figure 4. Application Experiences Are Implemented by Different Constituencies
All of these constituencies can build application experiences using the self-service integration and composition capabilities delivered by central IT. In principle, the integration and development tools used by central IT, LOB IT and business users are all coordinated so that the governance of the environment is unified, and collaboration of all participating roles is supported natively.
Initially, central IT will provide business users with tools they can use to simply configure and customize the application experiences provided to them. As confidence in the composable enterprise model builds, central IT will empower business users to develop their own unique application experiences by combining PBCs in new and specific ways.
Technology Investments
These scenarios are not as far off as they might seem as they are already enabled, albeit in still relatively rudimentary ways, by the growing availability of low-code/no-code application development and integration platforms (see “Low-Code Development Technologies Evaluation Guide” and “Technology Insight for Enterprise Integration PaaS”).
iPaaS offerings typically target integration specialists, but LOB IT personnel (for example, developers or SaaS superusers) will occasionally need to perform some integration work (in their role as “ad hoc integrators”). By using machine learning, natural language processing and other AI techniques, many enterprise iPaaS providers are also addressing the needs of business users with minimal IT skills (the so-called “citizen integrators”). Moreover, some low-code application platforms (for example, Quick Base) are adding iPaaS capabilities, some iPaaS offerings (for example, Dell Boomi) are incorporating development capabilities, and many providers supply both (for example, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and Software AG). The increasing continuity of development and integration tools reflects the rapidly changing nature of development toward the integration and composition function, and vice versa.
The technology used to support LOB-specific application experiences is, by and large, already available and reasonably mature, even if low-code/no-code development platforms and iPaaS are often not yet integrated into coherent architectures (even if they are from the same vendor).
Integration technology that allows business users to build application experiences is also available, although from a limited number of providers. Some of these providers have a very large numbers of users (in the order of millions, for companies like IFTTT and Zapier), especially in the consumer and SMB segments.
Technology aimed at citizen integrators is much less popular and mature for enterprise use. Nonetheless, in the near future we expect some notable progress, in both adoption and functionality, owing to significant R&D and marketing investments by enterprise-oriented providers.
Empowering LOB and business users to perform composition and integration work by themselves will prove to be a quite complex, but also potentially highly rewarding, endeavor. This involves, among other things, extending your integration platform strategy accordingly.
You may have adopted iPaaS offerings already either opportunistically (to support specific uses cases like SaaS integration) or as a key component of your integration platform strategy. This would give you a good foundation to enable LOB IT, but probably support for citizen integrators was not a top priority in the selection process. Therefore, the iPaaS you have in place may not provide strong capabilities, in this respect.
Therefore, you should assess to what extent the integration platforms you have in place can support your citizen integrator requirements and the specific patterns of composite application assembly, no matter how quickly or slowly you expect your organization to move toward the composable enterprise.
Today, for most organizations, support for citizen integrators is “nice to have,” but it will become a “must have” over the next three to five years.
Ultimately, to support a democratized, self-service composition approach, you will have to rethink your integration strategy to include technologies that can support ad hoc and citizen integrators — and probably also low-code/no-code development capabilities — to enable development of personalized user experiences (see “Integration Personas and Their Impact on Integration Platform Strategy”).
The Gartner Hybrid Integration Platform Capability Framework provides a reference architecture that you can use to determine what are the integration, composition and automation functionalities that you may need (see “Innovation Insight for Hybrid Integration Platforms”).
However, it is important to note that this framework is overprovisioned with respect to the composable enterprise requirements, as it includes also functionalities to address classic integration scenarios, such as batch data integration or EDI-based B2B. Therefore, only a subset of the framework is strictly needed to enable democratized, self-service composition (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. HIP Is Foundational to Composing Application Experiences
A “light” form of HIP providing just five elements of the framework would be enough to support application experience composition by IT and non-IT constituencies:
- Communication styles and protocols
- Service mediation and event brokering
- Core application and data integration
- Orchestration and composition
- Governance and operations
Low-code development capabilities, as a sixth element, could be a plus.
However, as noted earlier, your organization will not transition into a composable enterprise overnight. For a long time (probably years, possibly forever), the new and the old models will have to coexist. Which means that your HIP strategy will have to support both democratized, self-service integration as well as classic application, data and ecosystem B2B integration uses cases. Therefore, it is sensible for you to rethink your integration strategy holistically, and not only in the light of composable enterprise requirements.
Implementing your integration and composition platform, whether as a “lightweight” or “full” HIP, however, may prove quite complicated. This is particularly true for organizations with little or no integration experience (to self-assess your organization’s integration maturity, see “IT Score for Applications”).
Engaging in a massive project to implement your integration and composition platform all at once may prove very risky — and probably hard to justify.
In most cases a step-by-step process, which builds your integration and composition platform by incrementally adding building blocks and evolving your integration team’s skills accordingly, is more practicable, less risky and easier to justify (see “How to Deliver a Truly Hybrid Integration Platform in Steps”).
Organizational and Governance Models
Of course, throwing technology at the problem, is not sufficient to enable democratized, self-service composition. LOB IT and business users must be properly educated, trained, assisted and supported on the tools and methodologies (see Note 7). Moreover, democratized, self-service composition could easily turn into a wild-west situation if not properly governed (see Note 8).
These are issues that cannot be fully delegated to LOB IT teams, let alone to individual users. Addressing them must be the task of a central IT team, which, if needed, works with LOB IT departments according to a federated model. The overarching goal is to enable:
- Enterprisewide sharing of packaged business capabilities
- Application experience interoperability
- Consistent user experience and quality of service.
To govern an increasingly democratized, self-service integration approach, most progressive organizations are evolving the roles and responsibilities of their classic integration competency centers (ICCs) accordingly. Typically, ICCs target the delivery of integration projects as efficiently as possible, but these organizations are turning their ICCs into business-oriented, “service providers” focused on empowering a variety of personas to perform integration work in a self-service fashion.
Gartner calls such an evolved ICC setup an integration strategy empowerment team, or ISET (see Note 9 and “Integration Strategies for the Digital Era Require New Delivery Models”).
Most current ISET implementations are primarily aimed at enabling integration specialists and ad hoc integrators. Supporting the fully democratized, self-service integration approach mandated by the composable enterprise paradigm, will require you to proactively address citizen integrators by adopting a much more aggressive “consumer oriented” approach.
Recommendations:
- Use new business initiatives to incrementally build a fully self-service, integration and composition platform.
- Consider the Gartner HIP Capability Framework as a reference architecture for your composition platform.
- Establish a business-oriented ISET that focuses on proactively and pervasively empowering application composition by dispensing guidelines, best practices, governance processes and support services to business and IT constituencies.
Note 1The Composable Enterprise Defined
The “composable enterprise” is an organization that delivers business outcomes and adapts to the pace of business change through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities, comprising application building blocks that are software components purchased or developed.
Note 2The Native Packaged Business Capabilities Composition Scenario
IT engineers use orchestration, as well as mediation of APIs and event channels, to construct packaged business capabilities by connecting the appropriate fine-grained services with each other and with the relevant data stores.
Note 3The “Pseudo” Packaged Business Capabilities Scenario
IT-skilled teams use orchestration, integration and mediation to make traditional systems “look like” PBCs by wrapping some of their functionality and data with API and event channels. In this context, the PBC “code” will only include “integration logic,” whereas the actual business logic and data will be those of the legacy systems.
Unlike native PBCs, their pseudo equivalents lack autonomy, data independence and mobility, so they don’t deliver the full experience of the continuously adjusting composable enterprise.
But they can enable, without an expensive and risky application redesign:
- An incremental modernization of your application landscape.
- The inclusion of most current applications in the new scenario.
Note 4The Application Experience Composition Scenario
In the context of a given application experience, a variety of IT and non-IT personas use orchestration and mediation, along with multiexperience development technology, to:
- Implement the multiexperience “presentation layer.” This requires the use of some (typically low-code) application development tool.
- Connect the participating PBCs to each other and to the relevant front-end channels.
- Synchronize data and processing across different PBCs.
Note 5The Legacy Integration Scenario
Both IT and non-IT personas use orchestration, integration and mediation to connect brand-new application experiences — or individual PBCs — with traditional systems, including monolithic SaaS and packaged applications, analytical platforms, data lakes/data warehouses and ecosystems.
Note 6Constituencies Composing Application Experiences
Broadly speaking, from a scope perspective, application experiences may be:
- Enterprisewide: These address widespread requirements (for example, processing expense reports). Typically, they are built and maintained by central IT and made available to a large number of the organization’s employees, partners or customers. However, LOBs (and, to a certain extent, individual users) can customize and extend them to meet their specific requirements or their preferred way of working.
- LOB-specific: IT-skilled personnel within LOBs, departments or work teams compose application experiences that meets local requirements. Then individual users have an opportunity to customize and extend them to reflect their specific business practices and preferences. These LOB application experiences will use the PBCs made available by central IT, but, to support local needs, they may procure or implement, in case by integrating traditional systems, their own “private” PBCs. They may or may not decide to share these private assets with other LOBs.
- User-specific: In this case individual business users (or communities) compose their own “personal” experiences, by using PBCs supplied by central IT or LOBs.
Note 7Integration Support Needs
LOB IT and business users need support from central IT enabling them to:
- Learn how to use the integration and composition tools.
- Know the marketplaces where they can find the PBCs available to them (and, at least in the case of LOB IT teams, how to build new capabilities).
- Consult the repository of examples and best practices built by central IT and LOB IT teams.
- Figure out how to reuse application experience templates.
- Understand the rules of engagement.
- Find support when they have problems or need suggestions.
- Prepare to use event stream processing for externalized analysis of PBC activity.
Note 8Integration Governance Needs
Central IT must enforce the following governance processes to enable democratized, self-service integration:
- Maintaining a marketplace of the APIs and event channels exposed by your PBC capabilities portfolio.
- Managing APIs, event channels and application experience life cycles.
- Collecting, formalizing, documenting and making available best practices (either in the form of documents or as reusable application experience templates).
- Defining security and compliance guidelines and guardrails.
- Ensuring enterprise-grade quality of service (including availability, reliability, scalability, throughput and latency) for the whole organization’s integration and composition infrastructure.
Note 9Integration Strategy Empowerment Team Responsibilities
The responsibilities of the ISET include:
- Designing, implementing and evolving the core organization’s integration and composition platform.
- Defining and enforcing the governance processes.
- Providing education, training, support, service desk and “customer success” services to both IT and non-IT personas.Working with LOB IT teams to support their local technical and governance needs according to a federated model.
SOURCE : MICROSOFT + GARTNER https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-1ZD83TY5&ct=200630&st=sb