Top 3 reasons why companies should invest in integration architecture

Welcome again to our EDS Touchpoints, where we talk about about Enterprise Design Services. Enterprise Design Services is a one-stop-shop for delivering Enterprise Architecture, Business Design and Information Management. These three practices all intersect in a sweet spot when you, as an example, develop new customer facing digital services.

We are Nils and Julia, two members of the Enterprise Design Services team, and we are writing this blog to discuss about recent topics in the fast-paced, changing, more and more digital world. We interview experts on their field of specialty and want to understand what it takes for businesses to make it in today’s competitive world.

In this post we are interviewing Pasi Vänttinen, an IT architect at KPMG Enterprise Design Services team.

I am working as an IT architect at KPMG Enterprise Design Services team, focusing on enterprise and integration architectures. Since I have software development/architecture background, I also work with different DevSecOps-related assignments. 

Integration architecture provides companies a solid foundation for facilitating interactions between their own systems and their suppliers/customers.

CRM and ERP systems often need to exchange information with one another and therefore need to be integrated. Although integrations are typical to many businesses, the sheer number of different systems make them complicated.

Traditional point-to-point integration between various systems would result in a spider’s web integration, which eventually leads to management and error correction challenges. Moreover, with everything being interconnected, when something goes wrong with a specific point within the integration, every other point needs to be fixed or replaced. Consequently, integrations nowadays are often managed with integration platforms and reusable APIs for better management and error correction.

1. Integration architecture provides an overview on data classification and data transfer within and between organizations, which is the knowledge businesses nowadays need to have.
2. Well-designed integration architecture supports business development by providing businesses a solid foundation for any new offerings.
3. Investing in integration architecture design saves businesses considerable maintenance costs and releases organizational resources for more productive tasks. 

When integrations are working properly, they are invisible. Same thing goes with life, everything often goes smoothly. It is good to remember life does not always follow one’s plans and therefore, it is good to have a backup plan for the bad days.

Read our EDS Touchpoints blogs!