In today’s era of digitalization, it has become necessary for organizations of every size to adopt two-speed IT strategies to support the rapid pace of change. The two faces of IT, traditional systems and innovative initiatives, need to co-exist and interoperate with each other. It will become critical for organizations in the near future to reshape their structure and become bimodal to achieve sustainable advantage in this evolving digital business world.

Sticking to just the traditional form of IT might have worked well for most businesses in the past, but it surely is not going to work in the future. Change is the word for this century, rapid and holistic. The innovations in IT are not a storm but a wind, a wind that has the potential to sail your organization towards unknown revenue streams, but only if your traditional IT sails are strong enough.  

Challenge with the traditional approach

Integration of the two modes of IT has become a top priority for most of the futuristic CIOs, but many still consider it as a necessary evil, something which needs to be dealt with rather than understood. Even when dealing with the “problem”, organizations tend to think that acquiring a traditional, high-end-on-premise platform (such as B2B gateway software, data integration tools etc.) and setting up a systematic integration delivery approach will settle this problem once and for all. It is irresponsible to assume that these systematic and traditional approaches will be able to address the new integration requirements sufficiently.

The systematic and traditional approach towards integration does not have the agility to support ubiquitous, fast-time-to-value and adaptive nature that modern integration needs. It is often driven by semi-autonomous initiatives of departments and lines of businesses. But CIOs are now being forced by new bimodal IT realities of digitalization, cloud, mobile and big data to change their view of integration and pursue it right from the stage of application design. It is needed now to allow traditional methods to evolve dramatically to tackle the new reality of pervasive integration.

Best Integration Practices

Mode 2 digital business initiatives are interdisciplinary and require the integration of resources across multiple domains. You will have to deal with mobile, IoT, B2B and application integration issues and will have to experiment with ways to relate constituencies. Organizations need to adopt a flexible approach such as adaptive integration.

Adaptive integration is based on the principle of just-in-time, DIY integration that can be carried out by the functional and application teams themselves instead of a central team of integration specialists. It involves the use of ad-hoc integrators who are basically professional developers with skills to develop reasonably complex integration flows and APIs by using open-source integration frameworks.

These ad-hoc integrators may expose your organization to security, compliance and governance risks and mount some technical debt. But they can also help your organization to improve agility and time to market of individual projects. Moreover, it frees your central integration teams to focus on more strategic and business-critical needs.

Enable DIY integration via a Facilitation team

Non-IT skilled business users may also need to perform relatively simple integration tasks in today’s evolving business world. These personal integration needs have given rise to the phenomenon known as the citizen integrators. You will need manage it too because you do not want these individual users to pursue DIY integration in a spontaneous and unregulated fashion. An integration facilitation team would be required here. This team should be in charge of designing and implementing an integration platform capability that can support integration specialists, ad hoc and citizen integrators while also providing them with training, consulting and help desk services.

API-first approach

In order to minimize time, effort and cost of integration, and also enable DIY integration by non-specialists, you need to embrace an SDA-based API-first approach to implement new applications. APIs are popular and have a widespread support in packaged applications, SaaS, application development and tools and integration platforms. You should favor offerings which deliver a rich set of well-documented and easily understood APIs when selecting packaged applications or SaaS. An API management strategy should also be made so as to ensure the scalability of API first approach. This can be done by publishing, discovering, consuming, tracking and monetization of the available APIs.

CIOs should understand what bimodal IT means, its relevance within their organization and the vendors in the agile IT ecosystem. It is important that CIOs shed their old beliefs and insecurities about bimodal IT and re-envision the integration strategy as a holistic, pervasive and low-touch bimodal integration approach is the entry ticket to the coming digital era.

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