Integration of digital data and systems is at the heart of business success. Connecting data across functions and workflows effectively is crucial, yet many organisations struggle with improving systems and accelerating performance when they approach integration on a project-by-project basis. A more strategic approach, involving a unified platform — or a ‘fabric’— can deliver fast, flexible and scalable integration across the enterprise, driving significant benefits.
Typical way: A recipe for complexity
- Teams connect applications and systems as needed, point-to-point, and on an ad hoc basis or resort to manual data exchange.
- Over time, an organisation winds up with a mixture of systems, standards and security protections.
- IT spends a significant amount of time setting up each new application or system.
- A new system doesn’t deliver the degree of digital integration required for today’s business requirements.
- The enterprise consistently struggles to perform at speed — and it struggles to integrate technology both inside and outside the four walls of a business.
A better way: Strategic integration
- Full stack platform modernisation ties together all assets producing digital information.
- An organisation standardises systems and solves meaningful business problems.
- A broad ecosystem reduces time and money spent integrating IT and making sure systems perform optimally.
- Cloud and legacy systems work together seamlessly. APIs and middleware deliver fast and effective integration.
- The enterprise achieves a strategic and sustainable framework for integration and business transformation.
A strategic integration fabric functions like a central nervous system for system integration initiatives, helping to trim costs, reduce technical debt and unlock new business opportunities. Instead of managing countless disconnected processes, a single interconnected digital fabric spans applications, systems, and technology platforms, simplifying and automating tasks. The fabric provides a library of modular components—APIs and software solutions—that can be easily assembled and redeployed across various applications, reducing redundant development efforts and accelerating innovation.
In practical terms, the same APIs and components that made one project successful can be quickly and easily applied to subsequent projects. For example, the technology stack used to build a commerce website can be directly integrated into a mobile app, saving time and resources. Once this fabric is in place, organisations can plug in new services on demand, getting them up and running within days rather than weeks or months. This approach also extends to business affiliates and others in the value chain, enabling seamless process automation and orchestration across companies.
Achieving a digitally integrated framework involves six key components:
- Diagnostics: An analysis framework identifies maturity areas, gaps and methods for bridging them, producing a roadmap aligned with the organisation's goals.
- Strategy: Aligning the organisation through a strategic vision and business case, supported by a clear integration and data strategy.
- Blueprinting: Translating ideas into reality with a technical direction, integration architecture and operating model.
- Enablement: Establishing key structural components, such as a centre of excellence (CoE) and an API adoption plan.
- Implementation: Integration at scale can take place only when all the various pieces are in place — and when everything’s been thoroughly tested and piloted. At this point, there’s coordination across major enterprise applications and managed services.
- Operation: Ongoing monitoring and optimisation to ensure the integration fabric evolves with the organisation's needs.
This process leads to a systems integration fabric that aligns with the enterprise's vision, mission and business strategy. By decoupling the architecture from specific technologies — and the restrictions they present — organisations can achieve real-time integration across legacy systems, cloud microservices and other platforms. The result is lower total cost of ownership and improved revenue opportunities.
This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in PwC’s TechEffect. If you would like to learn more or need help to map and engineer a modern IT framework for your organisation, please contact Chris.Westhorpe@au.pwc.com or Arya.Choudhary@au.pwc.com
