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Digital transformation – commitment for the next 10 years
Digital transformation makes your enterprise rethink most of the processes and business model to fully utilize the possibilities that you can get from modern software and technology. Whether you are investigating switching from Excel to a modern ERP or setting up IoT infrastructure on your production line, you will have to commit to selected functionality for a long time. Is your enterprise ready for such commitment?
When you buy a house, a new car, or a phone you hope that you will be able to use it until the end of time and it will never break. But what if after a year you understand that your house is in the wrong city, your car only drives backward and your phone is not actually a phone – it’s a live rat and its antenna is actually a tail. The same situation can occur when you invest in new systems – there is a possibility that the system will not fit your business needs or can be adjusted to fit your business needs with extremely large investments. What’s worse – if you realize this in the middle of transition you might not have an opportunity to switch out to something else.
There must be a way to mitigate these risks, fail fast, adjust and spend all your savings on new features. And there is. In comes the API Management platform. A logical solution to providing fast onboarding for various services and providing building blocks for businesses to utilize the onboarded services to create new products and services. API Management solution provides not only a simple implementation of new features but flexible monitoring options as well as taking care of your legacy (irrelevant if on cloud or on-premises).
Quick implementation of SaaS
In any aspect of life, the initial plan rarely works. Mostly because there are a lot of assumptions and suddenly real life kicks in. What’s worse than the initial plan not working as expected? A situation where you notice the failure quite late. If you are going on vacation it’s easy to return home to get your forgotten passport if you are just around the corner. It is not easy if you are at the security gate in the airport. The same principle applies to new systems and their functionality.
- Evaluate your business process
- Prioritize specific processes that would bring the most benefits
- Design your APIs and microservices to reflect your process
- Develop APIs as building blocks and publish them in API Portal
- Evaluate the time, cost, and value you got from implementing the most important process
As most of the services are available on the cloud with good API infrastructure, it’s extremely easy to onboard SaaS products and to offboard them. Only 2 pre-requisites exist – first and most importantly you need to be using an enterprise-level API management platform to manage these APIs and secondly – don’t sign any contract until they have given your team a chance to play with their API. One sprint of development will cost you less than a dedicated team just to adjust the product that is not doing what was expected.
Gradual implementation
Once your mind is set on the systems, continue with the prioritized list. Businesses will be able to use new and improved functionality fast and easily. Fast feedback also means that you will be able to deliver a better product even faster.
At one point you will need to use other systems/APIs which brings in a bit of complexity to align priorities between systems, but general process evaluation should help you with this question. During the transition you don’t need to wait for the “BIG BANG” anymore, you switch gradually from old functionality to new while removing the waste on the way.
For example, you should do data mapping before you start migrating to a new system. Once the new schema is clear, your team can migrate clean data to the new environment and create a small API for daily synchronization with the old database. Maybe your team creates a temporary API that uses the old base for a new system with some data transitions. Whatever strategy you use – you have the tools to manage the APIs, data, and lifecycle. Once a temporary API is not needed, you just remove it.
Building Blocks
After the initial implementation of processes has been completed your team can continue to deliver high-value software to businesses while making them more and offloading your team from redundant boring tasks.
As you deliver the prioritized APIs the architecture should be built in a way that every API / microservice is responsible for distinct functionality (and have good documentation for each). Now the business can start combining (configuring) the workflows to reflect the process and (the best part) start creating new products. All your team will have to do is deliver high-value items and optimize everything around them.
Take this simple process (each block is a microservice)
And transfer to this
A very simple example. Once the blocks have been delivered, the business can configure its workflows while your team concentrates on the next algorithm or data manipulations. No more manual, boring tasks. Instead, businesses can do User Testing directly, regression tests occur for each function automatically and new innovative products have been born.
API platform gives you flexibility and freedom to deliver, innovate and optimize every possible process that you can think of. It allows you to onboard any service instantly and if it’s not the perfect fit – offboard it quickly. To fail fast and win big you will need the correct tools. But once you master them, there is nothing stopping you. To learn more about the unstoppable tools, leave your contacts and we will get back to you. No more committing to something that doesn’t make you happy.