It seems most companies that's been around for a while has this one software or system they just don't seem to be able to get rid of or update in any way. Often are we talking about the accounting system, CRM software or any other that holds a lot of
information that is crucial to our business. The biggest problem is that all of our other important business software is somewhat connected to this. Either with a direct integration or by mirroring of the system's data structure or business logic.

How to get around this spaghetti of integrations? Or even better; can we ensure this never happens (again)?

The answer is as complex as it is simple. And it will definetely be a hard discussion to have with management. It will also feel quite overwhelming if the company has been around for some years and has incurred a lot of technical debt.

And how can we make sure to highlight the return of investment this gives the company over time? Because it will cost a bit to do this, and to be honest, for most users a successful integration platform ensures that "everything works as it did before".

So to begin with, we will cover some of the pitfalls to avoid If you are so lucky that you can take this into consideration at an early stage. But most of us are not that lucky and therefore we will delve into common challenges, tangible methods and structures to use when mapping out the spiderweb of systems and software. These mappings will also be tremendously handy when it comes to sketching out an integration platform but also in order to demonstrate for management why an integration platform is important. The overview will actually make you able to remove these ingrained systems that seem too strongly tied to all your other systems and business logic.

Towards the session’s conclusion we will touch into how to take all the gathered information into the planning of structuring a "standardized" integration platform for your business. Standardized in quotes, because even if all components, infrastructure and resources are standardized, you will have to tailor this to your company’s needs and existing systems.

Maybe we can make it a bit easier (and cheaper?, more manageable, maintainable and easier to monitor in the future to implement new systems and software into your
business.

A bit deeper:

We know we need to gather all our integrations in an integration platform. In order to be able to monitor, handle and not at least swap systems with the least amount of "pain" - being work hours or money. We, as developers and architects, see that all our
point-to-point integrations are unmanageable, but the management only sees programs that work together, and information that flows as it should. How to persuade
management to use money to see no difference in their day-to-day life?

Since our target for the platform is that every program should work just as it did before we standardized all integrations, we will highlight the upsides of doing this, such as monitoring and design patterns, but also the most important pitfalls and challenges, for example the fact that especially from the start you'll be making at least two integrations for every system you want to plug-in. Hence it's important to understand
how this will affect the future. For management we need to propose a solution that will show that we'll saves money
in the future. And saves pain and potential downtime.

Target audience is everyone from developer to technical management. Some experience as a developer would probably be beneficial to get the most out of this presentation.

This speak was first delivered at Caribbean Developer Conference 2022, in the Dominican Republic

A lot of this speech will be based on my earlier published article in Computerworld Norway (https://www.cw.no/debatt-it-systemer/hvorfor-er-det-sa-dyrt-a-skifte-et-it-system/428594) (Norwegian), but with a slighlty more technical view on it. The article was directed more towards a management audience, while I want to turn this towards a developer / tech architect audience.