How to determine the scope of an Integration Project

In digital transformation, determining the scope of a project is very crucial.

There are hundreds and thousands of areas which are upcoming and buzzing now-a-days and hence, defining the scope is a critical success factor for the team that is involved in the transformation journey.

This is equally true from the perspective of the enterprise that is going through the transformation as well as for the SI/Solution Vendor that is helping its customer to succeed.

In this article we will try to focus on one of the key areas digital transformation that acts as the glue to connect the different systems, applications and processes together.

Yes, you got it right. We will talk about determining the scope of an Integration Project.

Following is a set of standard questions, which when answered, will give a holistic perspective of the scope of integration in a digital transformation journey.

1. What is your current business ? In which industry do you operate ?

Tip : BFSI & Healthcare industries are hypersensitive to data security

2. Can you please detail out a little on the technology platforms that you use to implement your business?

3. What is your present integration platform / ESB engine ? Is it on premise ?

Tip 1 : Assess whether market leading on premise ESBs like TIBCO, IBM, Oracle, Mule etc. are being used, or something off the track is in place.

Tip 2: Premium ESB vendors have more sophisticated tooling that requires less coding and facilitates accelerated development lifecycle. You should make more room for development process for ESBs where high amount of custom coding is involved.

4. Do you also use a cloud integration platform?

5. In case there is no premise ESB or cloud platform, how are you integrating your current applications ? Are all point to point ?

6. What are the different communication protocols that are being used across your systems/applications ? (Viz. FTP, SFTP, MQ, JMS, HTTP, HTTPS, TCP/IP, SOAP/HTTP(S), SOAP/JMS, REST etc.)

7. Do you have any API management platform in place ?

8. In case there is no API management platform, how are you connecting external applications ?

9. What kind of NFR requirements do you have ? Please detail out SLAs, TPS, throughput etc. pertaining to different interfaces.

10. What kind of security is in place for your current integrations ? E.g. SSL/TLS, OAuth2.0, JWT, WS-Security etc.

11. Do you have any special security/data compliance requirement e.g. PCI DSS/SWIFT/ACCORD (for BFSI), HL7/HIPAA (for healthcare), EANCOM/EDIFACT/ANSI-X12 (for retail).

12. Do you want to continue with your existing integration & API platform or migrate to a better one ? What are your current pain points ?

13. What are the total number of interfaces that you have ? Can you also segregate/classify the interfaces in terms of complexity (Low, Medium, High) ?

14. Can you detail out the interfaces in terms of different source & target systems they integrate ? Please specify real time, batch, near real time as applicable.

15. Do you have high level and low level design documents in place for all your integration interfaces ?

16. Do you have source code in place for all your current integrations ?

17. When is the expiry of your current license entitlement for ESB & API management platforms (if any) ?

18. Do you want your SI partner to estimate and procure the product licenses for you ?

19. What is your migration/upgradation roadmap ?

20. In case of upgradation/migration to a new platform, do you want a big bang migration by migrating all existing interfaces at a time or do it in an iterative way where both new & existing systems will run in prod in parallel ?

Tip : Parallel migration will require support for old as well as new technology stack.

21. What is your change management strategy ?

22. What is your current release management procedure ?

23. Do you have any automated testing framework that can be used post migration in order to complete the Unit/SIT/Regression testing ?

24. In case no automated testing framework is there, do you have the Unit & SIT test plans along with test data & expected results which can be executed manually by the testing team post migration ?

25. What is the majorly used protocol to host/consume the services in your IT landscape? SOAP or REST ?

26. Are you using any service governance tool as of today?

27. What is your High Availability strategy as of today ? Do you have a DR site ? Is it an active or passive DR ?

28. What is your future integration roadmap ? How many interfaces do you plan to introduce in your IT landscape in near future (3 years)?

29. Have you got any plans to digitize any of your existing business channels (e.g. introducing any B2B or B2C mechanism)?

Tip : B2B requires some special tools and knowledge on EDI libraries as well as trading partner management. Check the existence of the same within the existing ESB framework.

30. What is your current incident management strategy ? Do you run a 24*7 support environment ?

Tip : Even for a single interface and zero tickets, you need minimum 7 people to support a 24*7 environment (One person may work only 8 hours a day and there will be planned and unplanned leaves.

31. Please provide a backlog of tickets raised in last one year with their priorities.

32. Do you have a KEDB & SOP & RCA DB for the raised incidents.

Tip : Non-existence of standard documentation can put your support team in jeopardy. Make the assessment before committing to any SLA guidelines for incidents. See past histories of raised incidents, their volumes and schedule adherences.

33. What is the various SLAs maintained by your support team for the different services/interfaces.

Tip : SLA adherence is a key KPI for a real time service. Be cautious before committing.

34. What is your logging & monitoring strategy ? Is there any enterprise tool in place (e.g. Splunk) ?

Tip : Integration team should not own Monitoring for the enterprise. But they should be facilitated to use the monitoring tool to generate alerts for exceptions/issues.

35. What is your data archival strategy ?

Tip : Data archival and retention should not be under the scope of Integration Team. However, Integration team will be the users of the data stores/databases, to be facilitated through a DBA.

While the list may go on, I just tried to give a glimpse of the key questions that are supposed to be put on the table. Comments and suggestions are welcome.