Tag: Digital

Demystifying APIs and Microservices

(Paper presented at MuleSoft Connect Conference 2017, San Francisco)

Reducing the time to innovate products and services and increasing IT assets access through APIs and microservices has been identified as key priority for the customer-facing organization (Forrester 2016, Deloitte Tech Trends 2015, 2016). In the age of customer, it is becoming even more important as customers demand better experience across channels, and market competition forces organization to innovate and provide better products and services at lower price.

This Point of View paper identifies and addresses key challenges faced by organizations that are embarking on the journey to expose IT assets via microservices and APIs. It explains that microservices are granular business oriented services that are combined to produce higher level process and experience services. APIs are different from the old approach of SOA in that APIs are more amenable to discovery, access and reuse by a large developer ecosystem of internal and external partners. The three-layer architecture of data, process and experience microservices is discussed and corresponding lessons learned are explained.

The paper further discusses the elements critical from strategic point of view, namely, ownership of leading the innovation and technical implementation, holistic approach, organizational change management, inherent trade-offs, relationship to DevOps, governance etc. Lessons learned and leading practices identified for building distributed systems are reviewed with specific focus on MuleSoft Anypoint platform features that facilitate quick and efficient delivery of microservices and APIs.

An example of financial retail company is given to correlate concepts with a real life scenario. It is expected that organizations implementing microservices and APIs will benefit from this paper.

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Enterprise Technology Roadmap: How to handle the complex decision process?

Enterprise Technology Roadmap represents the exercise focused on charting the course for your company’s future.

Like any exercise that involves dealing with long term planning decisions, technology roadmap or IT roadmap is a complex problem. By definition, any decision covering long time horizon is fraught with uncertainty leading to complexity and ambiguity.

The main reason for complexity lies in the conflicting goals of the main players (CFO, Business and IT) involved a shown below:

Figure 1. The Triangle of Dilemma

The solution lies in getting to a stage where CFO sees the priority and ROI from the IT program being pushed by business, and IT is able to deliver the products or services without ‘gold plating’. This requires working with all the main stakeholders and detailed investment analysis and planning is required for adding any IT initiative to the roadmap.

Application Rationalization is usually an integral part of the roadmapping exercise. It allows stakeholders to analyse the application landscape in view of current and future needs. It may involve following:

  • Adding new applications to the IT landscape
  • Enhancing the existing application to provide new features
  • Maintaining existing applications with no change
  • Replace existing application with new one
  • Retire the existing application without any replacement
  • Re-platforming the application on cloud

Further, in view of businesses pushing for digitalization, building of digital platform is gaining momentum as a precursor to building portfolio of digital applications and other IT assets. Building digital platform is not a easy task and requires long term commitment for investment and cultural change that are needed to enable digital business. This is the next topic of our discussion.

Author’s Note: I will continue to add more thoughts on digital journey to my blog. in the meantime, let me know of your feedback or comments.

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