Summary: LeanIX‘ EA Connect Day 2017 @ adidas – Integration Architecture

How to integrate the digital mE|Ass in times of digital tranformation?

We had an exciting day at the adidas Headquarters on 12th of November at the LeanIX customer event: the EA Connect Day 2017. As an officially approved consulting partner, LeanIX invited us to take the moderation lead of the world café „Integration Architecture“. This was an honour for us, and of course we were excited to unwrap our integration consultancy experiences, as it is an essential portfolio topic for ITARICON since 2006.

As a conceptual guarding rail for the world café session, we introduced the discussions for the guests – mainly enterprise, data or integration architects across all industries – with an overview of the whole complexity of integration in times of digital transformation. This illustration sketches the relevant influencing drivers that enterprise integration architects have to deal with these days (please see fig. 1).

Upon this basis, we brought up the key question: How to integrate the digital mE|Ass? We wanted to find out the real showstoppers and also possible solution approaches in order to create a strong integration architecture.

During the world café discussions, we asked the participants to place two classes of discussion items: 1. the key showstoppers that spoil a successful enterprise integration architecture, and 2. possible success factors that enterprises should help to overcome the showstoppers. Here’s the result:

1. Key showstoppers of modern enterprise integration architecture
   • „Vintage“ systems and the decision problem „integrate or replace“
   • Cloud risks & security mechanisms
   • Data object access and traceability
   • Data format balancing
   • Organisational silos
   • Cloud „offboarding“
   • Access and identity management
   • Bring your own Identities into your workplace
   • External data integration (e. g. partners, marketplaces)
   • Mass Data Integration (e. g. AI) and how to make use cases out of it
   • Technological diversity (e. g. new API worlds)
2. Possible success factors:
   • „Integrateful Thinking“
   • Data ownership governance/compliance
   • Standard data spaces
   • Organizational strategy for cloud (integration, development & operations)
   • Clear contracting towards Cloud Service Providers (e. g. data restitution rules after contract termination)
   • Data redundancy strategy for cloud
   • Traceability/transparency of data flows
   • (Inter-)national PKI

Résumé

Integration challenges are taking focus on creating concrete business value. Integration architects need to think more in a solution oriented way in order to make the business value factor. Although technical diversity of interfaces – coming conceptionally from EAI via SOA to API and microservices – is rising and therefore broad skills of integrators are relevant, the panelists significantly kept the discussion ratio on the business and data oriented environment.