Digital Business Enablement

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Being Ready for Digital, Explained How to become a customer-focused, omnipresent digital force in the marketplace

Think ‘Consumer Experience’

The road is laid out ahead of you. There’s no denying that the roaring engine of commerce you hear — the one powering the global economy irreversibly into the future — runs on data flow. It’s all over the headlines. It’s on social media. It’s in that TV ad that keeps interrupting your favorite sports broadcast.

How many digital devices or data streams have you availed yourself to today? Chances are you’re reading this white paper on a screen attached to a computer or tablet or smartphone, with an app or program that allowed you to download it at your convenience. Maybe you’re in a plane over Singapore or Canada at the moment. Perhaps you used your smartphone to display the boarding pass you were issued using that air carrier app on your iPad or Surface two nights ago, in bed somewhere on the European continent.

If you take anything away from the previous paragraph, it should be this: it’s all about you. Not as a CIO or a CTO or a CEO, but as an everyday consumer.

The greatest disruption in business as usual in the age of digital is that someone else is now calling the shots. It’s not the corner office, or board members or stock investors. It’s not Wall Street or the government. It’s the consumer. Sure, on our way up the career ladder we’ve all been fed the same clichés: “The customer is always right.” “The customer always comes first.”

But this time, it’s different.

Centered in a vast digital ecosystem swirling with data, and equipped with pocket-sized portals of connectivity loaded with captivating apps ready to please anytime, anywhere at the slightest whim, today’s consumer is now the definitive lord and master of commerce. The genie is out of the bottle and its name is digital business. As IT and enterprise leaders, it now falls upon you to understand exactly what the customer wants.

Fortunately, you can. Through constant interaction, real-time feedback and careful analysis, you can get a clearer picture of the digital consumer’s behavior over time and can harness this intelligence to carry you along the road laid out ahead of you. And as long you keep granting wishes, there’s no telling where it will end.

The big question is: are you prepared for the journey? Is your organization ready for digital? And what, exactly, does that mean?

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IT and Business Alignment

In the traditional blueprint for business success, your organization identifies market needs and front-office business strategists get to work figuring out how to meet them. Products or services targeting the new demand are introduced and marketed. The customer becomes aware of the value of the offering, identifies the brand, travels to an outlet or service provider, doles out some cash or swipes a credit card and takes delivery. Time, physical location, labor, overhead and other mandatories are all factored into the equation. Over the decades, innovation fueled by information technology at all business levels made this process easier and kept you competitive. But it was always clear: IT served the operations of the enterprise.

To be ready for digital business, however, you’ll need to do a mental one-eighty and stick the landing. Today, IT answers to the consumer. Armed with mobile devices, cloud services and cool and affordable apps, customers expect to interact with businesses seamlessly and in real time. They want to use their smartphone, computer, tablet — even their connected car — to fulfill their growing need for instant gratification. In a profound and fundamental way, this has upended the way enterprises think about business — strategically, culturally and structurally. This type of disruption is something that enterprises like Netflix, Uber and AirBnB have already learned to leverage very successfully. Yet it places enormous pressure on IT to come up with innovative ways to transfer, manage, analyze and utilize data to service the customer at exceedingly high standards. Meanwhile, IT leaders must also reduce costs, maximize resources and streamline processes as an internal IT provider — and to do so at the same high service levels bestowed on external customers.

This has led company leaders to totally reimagine how IT supports the enterprise, and vice versa. Technically speaking, in successful digital business transformations, IT has followed the so-called “5th wave of computer technology” known as SMAC — Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud — to align their efforts with macro-level business goals.

Digital business now relies heavily on the competencies of their IT functions to reach mobile consumers, improve their overall experience, and make the business more innovative and competitive. By observing the SMAC model, IT is now taking its cues from consumer behavior instead of forcing customers to adapt to business processes. As a result, the role of IT is highly influential in setting up the infrastructure and operating policies necessary to meet global business objectives.

But putting a digital platform in place to capture and keep customers is only half the battle. To support plans for true digital business transformation, members of your business trading community — suppliers, partners, regulatory, corporate — must also be able to engage easily with and within your digital ecosystem. By using a combination of connectivity platforms such as EDI, MFT and APIs, companies are shattering the strict B2B mold and establishing a more mutually advantageous B4B partner integration ecosystem where everyone puts the consumer first.

Objectives for Digital Strategy 1 C-Level leadership and IT heads across industries are unified in adopting a transformative digital business strategy in pursuit of common enterprise goals.

1 G. C. Kane, D. Palmer, A. N. Phillips, D. Kiron and N. Buckley, “Strategy, Not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation” MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte University Press, July 2015. N = 4,800 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations around the world

Embracing the SMAC maxim helps IT keep their efforts in line with overall business objectives

■ Social networking: To constantly follow people.

■ Mobile devices: To constantly reach (and to be reached by) people.

■ Analytics programs: To constantly analyze and predict people’s behavior.

■ Cloud computing: To scale on demand.

SMAC: Social. Mobile. Analytics. Cloud.

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Getting Ready for Digital

Understanding the prerequisites to implementing a program of digital business transformation — first, by accepting the customer-centric mind-shift and, second, that the new “raison d’être” for IT is to align better with business goals — is essential to being ready for digital.

How do you create the integration foundation needed to provide an omnipresent experience for the consumer that lets them interact with your business through multiple channels anytime, anywhere? How do you also ensure your partner community can easily engage with your digital ecosystem? More importantly, how do you do any of this in a way that uses time, money and resources more efficiently so you can optimize revenue?

Startup companies that enter the game as digitally native have it easier since they don’t have to figure out how to fit a previous infrastructure investment into a new operational paradigm to compete. But even If you’re an established company looking to transform to a digital business model, you can still come out on top by building on your existing legacy systems.

There are challenges, however. For IT to maintain existing and legacy systems while reducing costs, it has to reduce complexity and increase automation. Achieving this transformation is not easy and still requires investment in new licenses, hardware, consultation and other ramp-up costs.

At the same time, sudden increases in business demand can strain IT’s ability to react rapidly causing the department to default to a ‘supplier mode’ based on what is available (legacy systems). This leads to a patchwork of temporary fixes known as “Shadow IT,” which requires more data interactions between systems and adds a whole new layer of complexity and risk on the road to digital.

Moreover, IT has to move fast to avoid being displaced by external competitors, SaaS and other cloud-based providers that offer a better customer experience combined with quicker response time and a pay-as-you-go business model. Fortunately, there’s an answer: IT as a Shared Service.

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Shared Services

You can be ready for digital by leveraging existing assets and new technologies in a cost-effective, shared service platform that consolidates multiple types of data flows — MFT, EDI and APIs — into a centralized system.

This allows IT to shift from a technology supplier into a business-savvy IT provider that is not only driven by service demand, but also operates as a ‘profit and loss’ center — monetizing data and offering IT services at a competitive price. To do this, IT organizations act as an IT-broker, leveraging existing assets and previous investments as much as possible while integrating new technology to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). In this respect, non-native digital businesses are already halfway to digital, unlike digitally native newcomers who need to start from scratch.

IT as a shared service is a good way to reduce operational inefficiency, improve the customer experience and trigger new business innovations. The case for such an approach is further bolstered by:

■ Technology consolidation and rationalization. Shared services bring together IT systems comprised of layers and silos, open and mainframe systems, new and existing applications and IT systems at odds through company mergers and acquisitions.

■ Standardization and best practices. By reducing the number of technologies used, following a standard of fewer patterns, and leveraging best practices, shared services can deliver higher levels of expertise — making this approach even more efficient.

■ End-to-end automation and visibility. Shared services enable organizations to focus valuable people and resources on being more responsive to customer needs, eliminating costly human errors, and resolving problems quicker.

■ Service catalog. IT shared services can be presented in a catalog to help customers wherever they are. Subscribers — from IT, corporate or partner communities — can access and consume services using self-service dashboards when needed to support new business initiatives.

Of course, simply proclaiming that your IT organization functions as a shared service doesn’t make it so. You need a transformation plan to walk the talk. And it starts with understanding data flow best practices and governance.

Exchanging critical files securely using MFT as a Shared Service

Challenge: A popular watch brand needs to securely exchange critical documents, such as warranty information, and large files, such as catalogs, with small subsidiaries and brokers who have very little IT expertise or resources. The company wants greater control over these exchanges.

Solution: An Axway API Gateway is used to establish a single entry point to process any type of incoming request from subsidiaries or brokers. It provides real-time mediation to secure the transaction by checking autho-rization and authentication with a central database. When a large file is requested, the gateway triggers an Axway File Transfer Gateway, and the recipient receives a URL through a simple email to download the file.

Result: By combining Axway API Gateway and Axway File Transfer Gateway, subsid-iaries and brokers can easily and securely access critical documents using any device regardless of the size of the file and the IT infrastructure available. MFT as a Shared Service requires little if any IT expertise. The company can also control the exchanges to prevent any fraudulent warranty activity that could potentially impact its brand.

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Next-Generation Data Exchange Layer

Data flow is the lifeblood of any enterprise and needs to bridge various entities — IT teams, applications, business lines, trading communities and others. But this structure has shown that, when a problem occurs, it’s hard to diagnose and even harder to find the owner and fix it. Also, data flow has an immediate impact on business execution and the customer experience. But data’s influence on high-level enterprise decision-making is not well understood by IT engineers who are busy focusing deeply on technical problems in their respective domains, whether it’s application development, network management or IT operations.

Historically, system-centric internal data flows rely mainly on file transfer technology such as FTP file transfer software. External system-centric data flows are based either on secured file transfer (with SFTP or PeSIT protocols) or industry based Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It depends on the type of data exchange required. Some types of interactions will be supported by the EDI channel, some will need to go through a managed file transfer (MFT) connection, and others will use APIs.

More recently, the development of enterprise service buses (ESBs) and network attached storage (NAS) technology and automation based on job scheduling have completed the “toolbox” to exchange information in a system-centric mode.

The digital economy has also ushered in new exchange patterns to allow better collaboration. These exchanges rely on emails and cloud-based applications such as Google, which run independently from existing exchange technologies.

Managing flows of data among such fragmented islands of technology makes it impossible to transform from the worn, IT-as-a-supplier construct to the new IT-as-a-shared-service ideal.

To truly be ready for digital, you need a next-generation data exchange layer that will:

■ Provide all the capabilities and functions to work with existing exchanges patterns — internal, external and between partners — using the same solution components

■ Give you the scalability to consolidate and execute very large data flow volumes

■ Establish a repository of all flows being executed

■ Enable end-to-end data flow visibility

■ Employ APIs to integrate smoothly with existing technologies such as ESBs, Job Scheduler, NAS copy disk systems and others

■ Ease application integration and consumption by partners using APIs

■ Leverage APIs to expose all exchange capabilities in a simple and holistic way to partners, consumers and applications

Gaining big-time visibility into a Big Data Lake project

Challenge: One of the Data Lake project objectives of a large French Telco company is to provide a unified and consolidated view of households across multiple services and individuals. The main challenge is handling the high volume of automated file transfers among 90 applications located in different data centers.

Solution: Four Axway File Transfer Gateways are used in parallel to support 3 terabytes of data per day — through SFTP, FTP/S and PeSIT/pTCP protocols — to feed a 4 petabyte Data Lake based on a Hadoop open-source framework including HDFS, Elastic Search, Spring XD and others.

Result: The company now has a secure infrastructure with high availability and end-to-end visibility to control and monitor all data flow. It can route any type of flow — including binary data — to the Data Lake while ensuring timely delivery of large files. Data scientists receive relevant data precisely when they need it to conduct their 360° customer analyses.

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APIsAPIs are the flavor du jour for application integration based on an ESB-enabled service-oriented architecture (SOA) model. An API gateway can augment existing ESB solutions to make it more agile and more secure, allowing businesses to:

Reduce time to market (TTM)

■ No development needed for integration leading to a reduction of 75%

■ IT focuses on run-time, not build-time

■ APIs are consumer friendly and readily accepted and used

Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)

■ ESB licensing model is generally based on CPU usage

■ API gateway can offload most consuming tasks of an ESB

■ XML formatting, XML validation, protocol transformation, authentication traffic

■ No need for developers to redevelop the common features on every internal app

■ Security feature development reduced by 95%

Consolidate APIs

Using an API gateway will give the integration team the ability to consolidate APIs, allowing:

■ Single point of control and monitoring

■ Policy and rule creation to be external to API and applications

Serve as a firewall

An API gateway can be seen as a firewall for API, protecting exposed services from:

■ Denial of service

■ Code injections

How an API gateway strategy impacts Ready for Digital KPIs

Operational efficiency ■ Faster TTM (75%) ■ Reduce TCO (ESB license, server CPU, specific development

and maintenance) ■ API consolidation

Customer experience ■ Internal customer: easier to leverage existing services, “codeless” integration

Cyber threats ■ Out of the box security features (95% faster) ■ Ability to securely expose internal services externally ■ API firewalling

Business innovation ■ Create the ability to have external developers ■ Integration with cloud and mobile apps

Ease integration with mobile apps and the cloud

It is widely assumed that most cloud services and applications will connect with enterprise IT via API-centric architecture, so incompatibility with this integration pattern can render an application useless or a project abandoned. To help your company maintain a competitive edge and respond to disruptive forces in the market, you will need to use APIs to extend and expose core IT to cloud applications, adapt your architecture to suit digital business processes and scale to support a vastly increased number of users or clients.

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B2B 360°

Large enterprises with supply chain operations depend on EDI to manage day-to-day processes. It provides a strict framework for well-coded business processes, where all parties agree on specific formats for exchanging invoices, purchase orders, advanced shipment notifications and other business documents.

Enterprises have invested a lot in EDI to provide automation of partner data integration with enterprise information systems. The increasing demand for data exchange elasticity, scalability and dynamic growth, and a desire to cope with more partners, greater data volumes and emerging compliance protocols will continue to cement EDI as a strong business tool for the foreseeable future.

But EDI has its limitations. The technology alone won’t enable companies to exchange data in a more open and mobile cloud environment, where more and more customers and partners will be conducting a greater share of their business. For that, they will need to rely on integration with APIs to create a multi-channel B2B configuration. Historically, this would require two separate data flow silos, leading to higher infrastructure maintenance costs, greater risk of non-compliance with regulatory standards and SLAs, and, ultimately, lost business.

To truly be ready for digital, you need to ditch the silos and bring EDI and API together in a single, all around system — what we call: B2B 360°. One way to do this is through API-enabled EDI platforms, where APIs are used to open the EDI environment and access B2B services via other applications, portals and mobile apps. REST APIs expose EDI platform services and unlock new “EDI as a Service” capabilities.

Combining API and EDI for a flexible and open B2B e-commerce portal

Challenge: Axalta, a major German paint and coating manufacturer communicates with its largest customers, OEMs and distrib-utors using an Axway EDI/B2B Gateway. But for its smaller repair and finish customers, the company uses an e-commerce portal that’s easy to use and flexible for online ordering. They want to integrate the new e-commerce platform with their backend IT systems — particularly an inflexible, “isolated” EDI process — based on EDI-FACT-structured messages.

Solution: An Axway API Gateway manages the e-commerce flows by using API-enabled functions to analyze inbound data to protect the backend, and by caching API calls to accelerate response times. The API Gateway connects to the EDI/B2B Gateway to create complex EDIFACT ordering and shipping messages automatically. With the API Gateway, a mobile phone can be used to scan the barcode of items to be reordered, or take a picture of a damaged item — functions that a traditional EDI system can’t deliver.

Results: By automating the order-entry process and providing a smooth integration with legacy systems and EDI platform, Axalta has drastically reduced costs and increased its revenue. In the traditional paint and coating business, the company can offer new services — enhancing the customer experi-ence and positioning itself as a cutting edge digital business.

How an EDI+API strategy impacts Ready for Digital KPIs

Operational efficiency ■ Simplify on-boarding ■ Self-service ■ Flexibility to sustain new interaction ■ Management cost reduction

Customer experience ■ Simplify on-boarding ■ Exposes governance services ■ Self-service ■ Visibility

Cyber threats ■ Single point to manage users ■ Leverage API gateway firewall

Business innovation ■ Allow new business interaction, rich conversation on top of existing EDI channel

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MFT as a Shared Service

Managed File Transfer is something that many organizations know about. It is a more controlled way of implementing file transfers and comes in many forms — peer to peer, hub and spoke, mail-boxing and others — and it supports many different business processes. But as a stand-alone technology to get you ready for digital, platform, it just doesn’t cut it:

■ Requesting a new data flow is a lengthy project

■ Configuration is difficult and source of errors

■ Flows in production often don’t match the blueprint

■ Growing data volumes tax resources

■ Often lacks a program of continuous improvement

■ Visibility is partial, not end-to-end

■ Thousands of security certificates need to be managed

If you want to be ready for digital with MFT, your IT organization can offer it as a shared service. It’s less intrusive, and easier and faster to integrate with applications.

■ Simplify operation to support growth and reduce costs

■ Scale to meet the needs of the organization

■ Reduce the amount of unsupported and potentially risky software

■ Better align with the needs of end users

■ Improve compliance, security and internal customer experience

■ Compliance with corporate policies and customer SLAs

■ Service continuity, elastic scalability

How an MFT as a shared service strategy impacts Ready for Digital KPIs

Operational efficiency ■ Expose the MFT infrastructure as a service, easy to consume by applications and partners

■ Automation for fast delivery and in sync repository

Customer experience ■ Be able to respond quickly to new business demands by making application integration, people collaboration and partner exchanges easier

Cyber threats ■ Secure data at rest, in motion ■ Single point to manage users ■ Automatically manage certificates lifecycle

Business innovation ■ Address new exchange pattern to trigger a file transfer from a mobile, mix file and RSS flows in a single transaction

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Outsourcing “Ready for Digital”

Today many of the shared services discussed here can be outsourced as managed services to external and specialized system integrators. You will not only be able to provide IT shared services internally and externally based on an MFT/API/EDI integration foundation, but also allow critical resources to focus more on building and expanding your core business. It’s like an on-demand utility approach where you define SLAs and KPIs for the contractor and have the flexibility to scale services to as needed to fit any fluctuating data flow demand.

Whether you outsource or not, you will still need to re-engineer your digital infrastructure to deliver the high level of service expected by your internal and external consumers and trading partners. However, the possibility of outsourcing — and gaining the benefits it delivers — should be an added incentive for you to transform your digital integration foundation. If you don’t re-engineer, you can’t outsource.

Go Bimodal

Gartner defines “bimodal” as the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery: one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphazing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and non-linear, emphasizing agility and speed.

It’s not surprising then, that the digital businesses of the future need to encompass both modes. With EDI, for example, your enterprise IT team has a rock solid data integration foundation that provides enduring and secure connectivity. On the other hand, the ability to bring today’s powerful API technology to coexist with MFT and EDI — in a single system — allows IT operations and developers the freedom to create a multi-channel omnipresent reality that delivers captivating user experiences for an increasingly mobile society. A bimodal approach to being ready for digital promotes easier and extensive ecosystem engagement between your trading community as well and opens opportunities for new digital business initiatives in the future.

Obviously, in your quest to be ready for digital business, you’ll need a partner who understands how to shape the data integration infrastructure you’re going to need given your industry and plans for growth. Axway holds to a bimodal approach to digital business with solutions that enable you to build a secure and agile integration foundation, consolidate API, MFT and EDI as shared services, integrate new apps with legacy systems and leverage APIs to accelerate business innovation.

Ready?

There are many factors to consider as you plan your transformation to become a digital force in your marketplace. Re-evaluate how your front office and your IT organization think about the consumer experience and the expectations you need to meet in order to compete. Remember that both the CEO and CIO need to be in sync with a firm focus on what business success will look like down the road. Get ready to implement a shared-service IT model that leverages your enterprise’s investment in systems you have in place right now to accelerate your move to digital business. Understand how next-generation data layers can bring rigid, siloed data flow channels — MFT, EDI, API — together in a single, manageable and operationally efficient system. And make sure you get ready for digital with a partner who helps you see things bimodally and eats, sleeps and breathes this stuff every day.

Getting ready for digital is easier than you think. Click here to learn more.

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