Harnessing the power of data

How does the CJS create an environment that enables data sharing and interoperability? According to a recent connectivity benchmark report , 89% of IT leaders say data silos are the biggest obstacle to digital transformation and data sharing making interoperability a business wide challenge. Unsurprising, given the average enterprise has data in 900 applications, and just 28% of them are integrated. Salesforce’s recent Enterprise Technology Trends Report further identified that IT leaders say “disconnected data and systems” is the second-biggest challenge they face, behind “legacy systems.”

Data must be integrated across multiple platforms, systems, and applications — this complexity is tough to do well. Too often, it’s the number one reason causing new initiatives to fail. Organisations need integration approaches allowing them to unlock data sets once and empower teams to reuse it in their own experiences. The right integration approach allows you to extract the full value of your data and gather insights.

Often organisations integrating two data sets write custom code. This appears to be a quicker, but it often drives up costs, slows innovation, and increases security risks. As organisations perform more point-to-point integrations, the IT organisation is forced to adopt more complexity, shifting focus from innovation to maintenance.

To avoid creating indefinite technical complexity and data silos, a strategic approach to data and integration is needed. Here are four steps to bring API-led integration best practices into your organisation and set you up for success. Done thoughtfully, these steps will enable successfully connected experiences that inform key actions and encourage interoperability.

Build

The first step to API-led integration is to build APIs. This is most easily done by developers who are familiar with API builds. If no developers are available, look for lowcode tools that support drag-and-drop integrations. Start by writing APIs that unlock data from applications, cloud databases, and on premises systems. Look for an integration platform provider that simplifies this process as much as possible. Developer productivity is a crucial resource, so make sure your developers define the APIs, and let the platform generate API specs and perform the rest of the heavy lifting. Once your data is unlocked, write a series of APIs orchestrating your data into functional blocks, for example, you may want to create an API that composes SAP and Salesforce data into a single block of customer data. The final layer of APIs will power the experiences you want this data to feed into, such as an analytics platform, mobile app for citizens, or a website for employees. This layer of APIs should prep data for the format required for the experience. Some integration platforms offer connectors, API templates and other resources out of the box to simplify this process and enable developers to be even more productive. Make sure connectors exist for your most critical applications and databases so those can be integrated first as quick wins.

Your organisation will likely deploy each API in more than one place, look for opportunities to reuse APIs at every layer. Store them for reuse, including specs and integration best practices, in a central repository for reuse across the organisation.

Secure

Data security should be a priority for success, especially when integrating sensitive data, financial data, or regulated data categories. Any breach, large or small destroys user trust and deteriorates many of your larger data strategy goals. Data security starts with eliminating vulnerabilities. Most of this functionality should exist in an integration platform, including mandatory policy configuration, tokenisation, and network edge protection, this will facilitate the implementation of layered security, meaning there is security around the perimeter within which the API is deployed, within the API itself, and on the data at rest or in transit.

Manage

Once you deploy a new API, it’s essential to manage it closely. Some common API management best practices include setting alerts, access management, and defining SLA tiers. Be thoughtful about which teams and individuals have access to APIs, the goal is to empower teams throughout the organisation with APIs that unlock data, so open up API access to line of business users who will benefit from it. Good API management tools also let you track API usage if you need to calibrate governance and access down the line.

Monitor

Regardless of how perfectly you built your API, issues will arise, you must resolve them quickly. No matter where you host your APIs or what technologies you run them on, make sure you can monitor them all from one place. As your organisation invests in more APIs, you’ll quickly realise why this is so important. From this single pane, monitor all your APIs and integrations, and track the health of your entire network. You can also use this single pane to visualise dependency mapping, which allows you to identify and resolve issues quickly without additional disruption.