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There’s a lot that IT decision-makers must take into account when they choose an integration platform: team needs, use cases to solve for, value proposition, potential money and time savings, and, most importantly, return on investment. Once you’ve landed on an integration platform, the work isn’t done yet. From there, it’s time to identify the integration strategy. Before you build an integration strategy, however, it’s important to identify metrics that allow your teams to showcase how this work aligns with the business and business priorities. Some questions may also arise along the way: Is it possible to monitor alignment with the business in real-time? What is the best way to communicate this alignment to the company?
In this blog, based on our conversations with several IT teams’ leaders, we will answer these questions, sharing the best practices to measure alignment between business objectives and integration strategy.
When you’ve decided on a specific integration platform, on top of analyzing platforms and their costs, it’s likely that you also took into account other benefit metrics. Benefit metrics can include:
Though these metrics are important to you as the IT decision-maker, you need to remember that the business may not have the same interest in these insights. The business focuses on systems related to the company itself rather than the technical aspects of them.
That is why it is essential to include the following potential benefits and impacts on the business into your analysis:
The improvement in time to market metric begins with creating comprehensive use cases (what problems you’re looking to solve with an integration platform).
By prioritizing reuse rate, IT teams can save themselves from having to design new integrations from scratch every time the need arises. The advantage of identifying the initial use case is that it means that you will be able to meet the business’s existing needs.
Tip: At the same time, it allows you to explain these needs in a forecast of integrations based on the API-led model.
Combining the API-led model with the use case will define the number of APIs needed to be  developed and their forecast. But that is not all. If you have initially analyzed the need for the integration platform based on business value through use cases, you can establish a baseline API reuse rate.
Suppose you have taken into account all the benefits in your analysis. In that case, you will have a total value associated with the different steps to production APIs and the other production waves. Typically, each production wave will be associated with different use cases, each with the expected value to the business. You can translate the business need into use cases, an integration forecast, and an expected value based on the API-led model.
Measuring value is an exercise that requires precision and investment in time; it makes sense to do it at the initial moment when deciding on the integration platform.
When you map out the projects, you should identify both a value based on the total benefit and an indicator that will allow you to manage the achievement of that value.
All this is thanks to the combination of the following elements:
In this way, the evolution of the reuse rate over time is an excellent indicator of alignment or alienation with the business. The risk of not applying a strategy based on an integration platform that takes these characteristics into account is, hopefully, a linear increase in integration costs.
The API reuse rate is not a static value. If you have correctly applied the API-led methodology, it will increase until it reaches a stationary value. At first, it will have a low value since you are just installing the platform, training your teams, and getting things off the ground.
But there will come a time when the value will stabilize, tending asymptotically to the team’s desired value. This expected value is necessary to guarantee alignment with the business.
In the following image, you can see how, as you reuse APIs, therefore increasing in the reuse rate, the unit integration costs decrease. The unit integration cost is the cost of each of the APIs or integrations.
Seen in another way, as you reuse APIs, the unit cost decreases and, by extension, the time to market improves. You can also observe that, in a normal situation, the integration costs grow linearly, if not exponentially.
This graph shows the Time to Market evolution curve versus the unitary cost of integration compared to a status quo situation.
In the same way, the unitary integration costs, the cost of an API in its complete life cycle, will decrease until it reaches its optimal value. Unlike the indicator of total costs, the decrease in unitary costs does not depend on the total number of APIs to integrate. Therefore, it is independent of the size of the projects or the integration waves to be carried out.
However, if the value evolves below the curve described, you will be developing slower than required, so you will have to pay attention to what has made your teams slow down in the integration plan. For both trends, there will be nuances that will come from the integration unitary cost analysis. For example, your teams may develop faster because they have applied more agile development methodologies, not because they incur any type of risk.
At this point, we’ve reviewed how to measure the alignment of the integration with the business. However, you cannot report such alignment based on integration KPIs like reuse rate or unitary costs since these metrics don’t mean anything to the business. As we discussed at the beginning of this article, it’s critical that we land on a metric that both IT teams and the business prioritize: time to market.
If your objective is to transform your company into a composable enterprise, you must adopt integration strategies aimed at improving time to market.
The reuse rate is not an indicator that sheds much light on the business. You have to translate this metric into something that the non-tech specialists understand. The decrease in the unit cost of integration over time is the answer.
The overall reduction in integration costs can be achieved due to different benefits from AINSYS: automation, automatic platform management, and security policies at the platform level.
However, let’s analyze the development component, regardless of other elements such as security, quality management, or maintenance. You will see that this is a function of the reuse rates. The following image illustrates how, as the total integration costs decrease at the beginning, and the unitary costs subsequently follow, you will also see an improvement in the time to market.
This graph shows the evolution of integration cost reduction and performance in Time to Market over time.
In part, the first image in this article anticipated this behavior by showing that the unit integration costs decrease as you approach the stationary value of the reuse rate.
In that graph, we saw that, as teams improve the reuse rate in each of the integration projects that respond to a group of use cases, they are improving the time to market because they employ assets already used previously.
If you analyze the pure development component of the integration unit cost, you would see how it decreases in each set of use cases and has a better time to market for the following. This improvement, which impacts development times and, by extension, time to market, is a plan with more possibilities of being accepted to present the alignment with the business.
Historically, there has always been a difference between what we are capable of measuring in integration and how in business it measures its objectives. Now, with increasing pressures on IT teams, it is necessary to close this gap to demonstrate this alignment in language that is shared and understood by the business. The best option is to analyze, from the moment of decision making, which integration platform to adopt by applying this type of analysis. But even if the decision has already been made and you are a AINSYS user but you are considering implementing more APIs on the platform, it is an excellent time to base your decisions on the reuse rate but communicate to the business based on the improvement in the time to market.
AINSYS offers you a range of other capabilities, making the integration process as smooth as ever. Sign up for a free demonstration right now.
You can also drop a comment below if you still have questions on how to better align integration strategy and business objectives.
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