Categories
Digital Transformation Platform Migration & Modernization

How MuleSoft Creates a Composable Enterprise as an Extension of Your Core Business Applications

Staying neck-deep in integrations is not sustainable. A recent MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report found that 98% of businesses are currently using APIs, yet 88% said that integration challenges are hindering their digital transformation efforts

With different approaches to tackling the challenges of modern-day integration scenarios, we’ve updated our popular whitepaper, The Value of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, and added a new comparison case study: Adapt vs. Adopt: How MuleSoft Creates a Composable Enterprise as an Extension of Your Core Business Applications.

Adapt vs. Adopt: The Value MuleSoft Anypoint Platform whitepaper provides a perspective on build vs. buy from a lifetime of engineering experience into integration and middleware challenges that enterprises face today. The new case study provides even more depth into the value of investing in MuleSoft Anypoint Platform showcasing data that breaks down the total cost of ownership and impact on project velocity of adopting MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs. adapting an existing API infrastructure.

Adapt vs. Adopt: A Comparison Case Study

It compares the journey of how two businesses, with identical requirements, addressed their integration challenges and the impact on corresponding feature rollouts. 

The comparison of the two approaches reveals how using MuleSoft resulted in:

  • 54% cost savings in the initial stages of API platform initiatives 
  • 32% cost savings for developing and deploying new APIs

Adapt vs. Adopt Whitepaper: Full Content Breakdown

  • Introduction
    • Why You Should Care About Integration
    • Green Irony Engineering & the Evolution of Integration
  • The Technical Landscape
    • The Dollars & Cents of Integration
    • Current Techniques & Challenges
    • Microservices, APIs & the Application Network
    • Project vs. Product & the Full Software Development Lifecycle
  • Bring Your Own Mule: Why Can’t I Just Build It Myself?
    • Reinventing the Mule
    • Advantages of Buying the Mule
    • Agility & Ability to Address Business Needs
    • The MuleSoft Approach
  • Staff & Expertise Needed to Execute
    • Skills Acquisition
    • Separation of Duties 
  • Total Cost of Ownership
  • An Adapt vs. Adopt Case Study: How MuleSoft Creates a Composable Enterprise as an Extension of Your Core Business Applications

Download this whitepaper to learn the benefits of leveraging MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform to manage the entire API lifecycle and extend your API infrastructure across your enterprise.

Categories
Green Irony News

Green Irony’s Commercial Revamp

A Common Sense Approach to Digital Transformation Backed by a 60-year-old Framework

Green Irony has always aligned our organization’s success to our customers. I started the company with a bet that Salesforce provided a superior technology platform that would allow our highly-skilled engineering teams to attack digital transformation initiatives more quickly and effectively. Having to deal with fewer “moving parts” with technology would enable our teams to focus more on other critical factors for delivering successful digital transformation outcomes.

Five years later, I can say that Salesforce’s platforms have not disappointed. Marc Benioff continues to evolve his technology vision and software offerings on the fly, giving organizations better tools than they have EVER had at their disposal for accomplishing their business objectives. Our team at Green Irony, effectively trained on these platforms, is capable of delivering scalable business value FAR faster and with fewer problems than we were without these platforms at our disposal.

There’s a but.

But, we’ve found that it isn’t enough to just be the best at delivering business outcomes using Salesforce and MuleSoft. There was another key set of variables limiting our success, and Green Irony needed a set of well-defined offerings to better address these inhibitors to successful outcomes. 

Digital Transformation Isn’t Just Technology

At its core, digital transformation is about transforming a “normal” corporate entity to operate more like a tech company. Ideally, this transformation merges the advantages of the existing corporate brand with the scale advantage of tech “disruptors.” A well-executed transformation results in the business having fine-grained control over processes that drive critical business metrics impacting revenue and profitability. These goals involve more than merely bringing in software platforms. Does creating a world-class mobile app alone make you Uber? And why do 70% of digital transformations fail?

The answers to these questions lie within the common sense of a 60-year-old framework.

The PPT Framework that was created in the 1960s says, to paraphrase: People, Process, and Technology must live in harmony for an organization to operate at a high level. People do the work and processes govern how they do it. If technology “levels up” significantly through “Tech Modernization,” it stands to reason that the other two elements of the PPT framework would need to support this change.  

Too many enterprises embarking on Digital Transformation ignore this common-sense wisdom.

Customers bring in modern technologies like Salesforce and MuleSoft and expect to wave Marc Benioff’s magic wand over their existing technology landscapes, perform anIT project, and deliver a business outcome fit for Marc’s next Dreamforce keynote. They parachute these shiny new platforms into their existing IT operating environments, say phrases like, “let’s do a base implementation,” and tell their teams to go. Chaos erupts. 

This approach is counterproductive to the organization’s goals.

Under this “strategy,” implementations are executed by People trained to enhance and support the existing legacy Technology. These People, with minimal training, set out to deliver capabilities on new Technology platforms using IT Processes that were defined for the older Technologies. These legacy Processes were also designed with different goals in mind than what’s necessary to succeed at digital transformation. 

People and Process misalignment in digital transformation have caused me to personally witness the following Corporate IT Horror Stories:

  • Customer buys MuleSoft for agility; Enterprise Architecture carves up processes for taking the “Donkey Work” in-house, increasing cost and eliminating MuleSoft’s agility
  • Customer purchases MuleSoft to accelerate development; IT does not train staff on MuleSoft and continues to unknowingly build its own in-house MuleSoft “competitor” on AWS
  • Customer acquires Salesforce to move fast; PMO leverages legacy KTLO processes that stifle innovation and grind the Software Supply Chain to a halt.
  • Customer hires high-end, dedicated platform consulting experts; point-and-click Salesforce administrators call the shots on architectural strategy

These stories will be explored in more detail at a later date, but they all have one thing in common: they have nothing to do with technology. They arise because the Technology leg of the three-legged PPT stool has significantly “outgrown” the other two legs when Salesforce and MuleSoft enter the equation in a technology modernization effort.

So no, we can’t be Uber just by virtue of having a compelling mobile application. Uber has evolved its People, Processes, and Technology in TANDEM to BECOME Uber and OPERATE like Uber. And transformations, even with a great technology platform strategy, fail without the appropriate People and Process to bring that Technology platform strategy into motion the RIGHT way. 

A Modern IT Operating Model

Building world-class People & Process capabilities to match the Technology capabilities of Salesforce and MuleSoft does not happen overnight. At Green Irony, our objective is to help our customers maneuver around this constraint, accelerate their Digital Transformation goals, and EVOLVE these other two legs of the stool as we move through the roadmap.

A well-run digital transformation engagement focuses on getting new business value in the hands of customers as quickly as possible, analyzing data, and rapidly evolving the technology based on the analysis. A successful process for delivering on these goals needs to be agile and it needs to be capable of getting right-sized capabilities to the market quickly. We need fast Software Supply Chain cycle times, continuous feedback on metrics that matter, and continuous evolution of the technology product with capabilities delivered to the end customer regularly.

This type of model is much more Silicon Valley than it is Corporate IT.

Existing Corporate IT operating models are geared toward keeping core day-to-day operations running smoothly and minimizing risk from even small changes. Resources are deployed on siloed projects with rigid schedules and limited visibility into upstream or downstream implications in the software supply chain. There is very little in common between the objectives or operating models used here and those that are used in well-run digital transformation engagement. 

The core operation must keep running smoothly as digital transformation capabilities are released quickly. Therefore, both portfolios of processes are required, each with specific purposes for the organization. 

Green Irony’s Market Response

Green Irony is already delivering exponential value using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and Salesforce. We’re evolving our offerings and our messaging to fully embrace what we’ve always been: a bridge between your existing IT operation and the business. We operate like Silicon Valley because it’s in our DNA to do so. We provide the People and Processes required to fuel your digital transformation goals while you mature your own internal operating models to match the needs of technology product development. This evolution doesn’t happen overnight, and our offering strategy is focused on ensuring it happens in a way that fuels technology innovation, protects the in-flight technology investment, and sets our customers up for ongoing success.

Our refined commercial offerings and messaging will focus on several key areas:

  • Creating a repeatable Software Supply Chain that rapidly delivers business value to our customers’ customers
  • Measuring, analyzing, and shortening the cycle time of this supply chain, fueling rapid delivery of on-demand capabilities to customers
  • Leveraging technology platforms and tooling that enable the rapid rollout of high-impact business use cases at scale
  • Optimizing future data access using MuleSoft, increasing the “clock speed” of the business by reducing the critical path of the Software Supply Chain

Our mission at Green Irony is to change the way that our customers think of delivering technology and to level up their organization’s ability to accomplish the main goal of digital transformation: Operate like a tech company and combine the advantages of that operating model with their own. These offerings will help our customers do just that.

Categories
Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation Strategy: A Checklist For Businesses

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Green Irony in April 2022 and has been updated to reflect the latest data.

No matter the industry, if your business is using native integration capabilities from Salesforce or building a reusable API that manages data access through MuleSoft, you are at risk of missing the mark on key business objectives if you don’t focus on creating an agile digital transformation strategy.

To achieve successful digital transformation and meet customer expectations, you must be innovative—but not just for the sake of keeping up with new technologies. You need to marry business and technology to create an agile business model with processes that can be scaled for the future. But where should you begin?

Digital Transformation Pain Points

First, you need to assess your current roadblocks. Use the following checklist to evaluate if your business is experiencing any of these digital innovation pain points:

✅  You’ve purchased new technology platforms, but don’t know how to leverage them properly.

As technology platforms continue to boom, companies are purchasing an increasing amount of SaaS solutions for their business as they consolidate their digital processes. However, new ways of doing business often require new skills to be learned. Struggling to leverage these platforms properly can come at a high cost. 

✅  The time it takes to connect all of your data is painfully slow.

Most businesses are used to writing a few APIs or scripts themselves. However, one pain point your business may be facing is the inability to rapidly integrate and utilize all of your internal and external data sources across the entire organization. This friction can put you a step behind the competition and can be detrimental to your business goals. 

✅  Technical expertise and bandwidth are simply not available, especially on small teams.

Even if your company has connected data, it may lack the technical expertise or bandwidth to scale projects easily and efficiently with API-led technology like MuleSoft. Whether you need to implement reservation booking, chatbot features, or loyalty programs, it’s likely that your data won’t be accessible or accurate. 

✅  Digital transformation projects ramp up quickly, but ultimately crash and burn.

Many companies and business leaders looking to gain a competitive advantage in the digital world will start too many projects at the same time without a cohesive vision or strategy in place—leading to major initiatives failing. When businesses move at lightning speed without a plan, the probability of crashing and burning is imminent. Many businesses soon discover they have the technology in place, but don’t have a corresponding long-term strategy necessary to truly leverage their digital tools. This not only affects your bottom line but can also decrease employee engagement and satisfaction, leading to greater turnover.

If you’ve identified with one or more of these common business problems—or if you’re newly in a state of panic—take a breath and keep reading.

3 Tips to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Keeping up in today’s digital age is necessary, but not easy—and there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Here are a few of our top suggestions to help you effectively implement an agile business strategy:

1) Gain alignment on your business goals.

Defining your desired business outcomes requires getting the entire executive team on the same page when it comes to processes, including how to navigate your current technology roadblocks that keep you from moving forward.

Unfortunately, gaining alignment across your entire organization is easier said than done. Our recommendation is to use your company vision as the backstop for all decisions and strategies. A healthy vision can make it clear what the right choices are when deciding on future projects, scope, and priorities. From here, determine how to fulfill that vision by accomplishing your set business goals.

2) Understand your data and integration needs for leveraging new technologies.

In order to realize your company’s goals, you need access to data and an understanding of the process. This means you need to connect to various systems, orchestrate calls between them, and combine them through business processes. The resulting data then needs to flow to the people and systems that need it, using data models that make sense across the organization.

However, building out a digital model of your organization that spans all of your internal and external systems is a daunting task. Though businesses are seeing an immediate need for the data and business logic to realize business outcomes, they lack an overall strategy and roadmap to execute against.

3) Create a digital transformation strategy.

You know which goal completions will lead to cost savings and revenue generation. You know you need system and data integrations to achieve those business goals. But where do you start? How do you move from your current operating model into total business transformation?

You need a digital transformation strategy that aligns your IT organization with the business organization. You need an agile approach that enables the creation of reusable assets that lay the foundation atop which you build your integration application network. You need to showcase ROI by measuring the success of new business processes through metrics and KPIs.

Blending Strategy and Execution with a Digital Transformation Consultancy Partner

Enter: Green Irony. We are the partner that specializes in blending strategy with execution to assist in your company’s digital transformation journey. We marry business outcomes with system integrations on MuleSoft by developing and executing integration roadmaps with defined and measurable ROI. We are constantly finding new ways forward in today’s digital world.

Bring your company into the 21st century—build your digital transformation strategy with Green Irony today.