Reinventing The Application Architecture in a Digital World

,In my previous blog on Architecting the Digital Enterprise, I presented a set of capabilities that are required to become a Digital Enterprise and how we organise them to deliver intelligent customer interactions/experience, enable new business models as well as improve service operations. In this blog, I will focus on application architecture and how its been reinvented in the digital world.

Traditional enterprises rely on commercial of the shelf ( COTS) as well as home grown applications to support business and operation processes. These application provide critical business capabilities like customer management, billing, ERP, Finance etc.

Business processes are implemented within as well as across number of these monolithic applications often integrated via Enterprise Service Bus ( ESB). These applications are being service enabled/transformed to participate in a Digital Enterprise world by exposing their capabilities as services and in some cases explicitly modelling business processes by using BPM tools. For many enterprises, these applications still remain critical to deliver services that can be then exploited to deliver digital experience and enable new business models.

The advent of digital technologies particularly Cloud, Big Data and Mobile as well as significant increase in the rate of adoption of open source is having profound impact on all aspects of application architecture.

Core applications/services: The shift is clearly now from large monolithic applications to independent services that are modular, designed for change, platform independent & horizontally scalable. To exploit full benefits of cloud, enterprises are increasingly adopting microservices architecture. These services have a single responsibility and the entire logic is encapsulated within the service so that gives them complete freedom on how they design, develop, build, test and deploy. That brings tremendous amount of flexibility as enterprises are now able to deliver change as and when required as against waiting for application release cycles. Be cautious when product vendors claim they provide microservices as in many cases, they are providing applications and a bunch of services on top which are still coupled with underlying applications! That doesn't provide you the flexibility that microservices can do. Microservices approach brings a number of benefits in terms of scaling and flexibility but be cautious on adopting wholesale microservices approach, as its highly complex particularly if you have a large set of legacy applications. Its fully distributed in nature so lot of attention needs to be given on support, service management and resiliency. Refactoring existing business processes/logic into a set of microservices is also very challenging.

Enablement Platform : In order to make these services intelligent, they need access to data as well as insights. The enablement platform provides those data services by using Big Data platform, predictive analytics and real time decisioning. The core applications also publish their data which is subscribed by enablement platform for further analytics and decisioning. Increasingly services delivered by enterprises are delivered by partners/suppliers either fully or partly. The enablement platform provides capabilities to compose, orchestrate and manage multi-enterprise services and processes.

Intelligent Engagement Platform : Customers now expect to interact with their service providers from anywhere using any device and using their choice of channel ( Messaging, App, Social etc.) and expect relevant, meaningful, personalised and context-aware interaction. This digital experience is delivered by the intelligent engagement platform which provides capabilities to integrate with different customer touch points,understand customer context using cognitive analytics( who, what, how, where etc.) and then provide meaningful interaction by integrating with services delivered by core as well as enablement platforms.

In this hybrid world of applications to services, on-premise to cloud, proprietary to open source, role of IT is also evolving. There are many aspects to this evolution ( architecture, organisation, roles and responsibility, sourcing etc.) but in the next blog I will focus on the integration architecture.