Your Challenge Even though organizations are now planning for Application Integration (AI) in their projects, very few have developed a holistic approach to their integration problems resulting in each project deploying different tactical solutions. Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more sophisticated integration tooling. Loosely defined AI strategies result in point solutions, overlaps in technology capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; the correlation between business drivers and technical solutions is lost. Our Advice Critical Insight Involving the business in strategy development will keep them engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives. An architectural approach to AI strategy is critical to making appropriate technology decisions and promoting consistency across AI solutions through the use of common patterns. Get control of your AI environment with an appropriate architecture, including policies and procedures, before end users start adding bring-your-own-integration (BYOI) capabilities to the office.

1. Info-Tech Research Group 1
V3
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2. Info-Tech Research Group 2
Create a formal application integration (AI) strategy blueprint to improve
success of IT projects and assert some control over today’s major IT
disruptors.
Introduction
Organizations of any size who have a formal
architecture in place or are transitioning to a
formal architecture.
Enterprise architects developing and
implementing streamlined application
communications with internal and external
stakeholders.
IT leaders managing systems that require real-
time integration.
AI specialists and architects responsible for
technology and data access enablement.
Business analysts needing to understand key
AI concepts to work more effectively with IT.
Understand the benefits and costs of AI.
Review the current integration environment
against future business and IT drivers to
determine what integration technology
components will be required.
Define an integration architecture blueprint
and periodically review and update it without
compromising the foundation.
Learn modern and trending architecture
solutions.
This Research Is Designed For: This Research Will Help You:

3. Info-Tech Research Group 3
Follow the Info-Tech AI Roadmap
Customer Service
Strategy
Build an Application Integration Strategy
• This solution set will provide insight into how Application Integration (AI) can benefit an
organization and provide faster time to value for application integration.
• Choose the optimal integration method for each of your applications and learn how to plan
implementation initiatives.
Vendor Landscape:
Application Integration Middleware
• Gain insight into which vendor best aligns
with your organization’s needs and which
middleware solution will provide the most
efficiency within your infrastructure.
Vendor Landscape: Managed File
Transfer
• Managed file transfer secures and
facilitates file transfer; it reduces risk and
cost, increases reliability and visibility,
and simplifies partner relationships.
AI Strategy
Implement and Optimize Application Integration Governance
• The governance of AI is often overlooked when developing an AI framework. Determine what governance model is
right for you to get the most out of your integrated apps and avoid headaches.
You are Here!

4. Info-Tech Research Group 4
Executive Summary
1. Involve the right stakeholders and
get them to drive the AI blueprint
initiative.
Business buy-in is critical from the C-
level down to the end user. Involving the
business in strategy development will
keep it engaged and align business
drivers with technical initiatives.
2. An architectural approach to AI
strategy is critical to making
appropriate technology decisions and
promoting consistency across AI
solutions through the use of common
patterns.
3. Self-serve integration is available
today. Get control of your AI
environment with an appropriate
architecture, including policies and
procedures before end users start
adding BYOI (bring-your-own-
integration) capabilities to the office.
Info-Tech Insight
Develop your AI blueprint
• Understand your current technical and business environments.
• Develop an architectural vision with building blocks and patterns.
• Perform a gap analysis between current environment and future vision.
• Plan for AI implementation within your organizational constraints.
• Manage the strategy through future technology and business
environment changes.
Make the case for AI in your organization
• Well-defined business drivers will result in a business focused
development of your AI blueprint.
• Involve all key business stakeholders in business driver and AI blueprint
development to triple your chances of success.
• Right-size the business case within the characteristics of your
organizational boundaries.
Understand the importance of AI in today’s IT environment
• Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the
cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more
sophisticated integration tooling.
• Organizations with a formal AI strategy doubled their AI success rate.
• Ad hoc AI approaches result in point solutions, overlaps in technology
capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; and the correlation
between business drivers and technical solutions is lost.

5. Info-Tech Research Group 5
How to use this blueprint
We recommend that you
supplement the Best Practices
Blueprint with a Guided
Implementation.
For most Info-Tech members,
these Guided Implementations are
included in your membership
plan.* Our expert analysts will
provide telephone assistance to
you and your team at key project
milestones to review your
materials, answer your questions,
and explain our methodology.
Info-Tech Research Group’s
expert analysts will come onsite to
help you work through our project
methodology in a 2-5 day project
accelerator workshop. We take
you through every phase of the
project and ensure that you have
a road map in place to complete
your project successfully. In some
cases, we can even complete the
project while we are onsite.
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
Use this Best Practice Blueprint to
help you complete your project.
The slides in this Blueprint will
walk you step-by-step through
every phase of your project with
supporting tools and templates
ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator
Workshop
You can also use this Best
Practice Blueprint to facilitate your
own project accelerator workshop
within your organization using the
workshop slides and facilitation
instructions provided in the
Appendix.
Book your workshop
now by emailing:
WorkshopBooking@InfoTech.com
Best Practice
Blueprint
Free Guided
Implementation
Onsite
Workshops
*Gold and Silver level subscribers only Or calling:
1-888-670-8889 Ext. 3001
There are multiple ways you can use this Info-Tech Best Practice Blueprint in
your organization. Choose the option that best fits your needs:

6. Info-Tech Research Group 6
Book a free guided implementation today!
Info-Tech is just a phone call away and can assist you with your
project. Our expert Analysts can guide you to successful project
completion. For most members, this service is available at no
additional cost.*
Here’s how it works:
1. Enroll in a Guided Implementation for your project
Send an email to GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com
Or call 1-888-670-8889 and ask for the Guided Implementation Coordinator.
2. Book your analyst meetings
Once you are enrolled in a Guided Implementation, our analysts will reach out to
book a series of milestone-related telephone meetings with you and your team.
3. Get advice from a subject matter expert
At each Guided Implementation point, our Consulting Analyst will review your
completed deliverables with you, answer any of your questions, and work with you
to plan out your next phase. *Gold and Silver level subscribers only
This symbol signifies
when you’ve reached a
Guided Implementation
point in your project.

7. Info-Tech Research Group 7
When we introduce
new Blueprints, we
offer workshops to our
members at no charge
for a short beta testing
period. Please check
the Workshop section
of our website for a list
of free beta workshops.
Book a workshop today!
An Info-Tech project accelerator workshop will help you to
engage your stakeholders, gather important data, make key
decisions, and generate a customized project road map.
Here’s how it works:
1. Enroll in a 2-5 day workshop for your project
Send an email to WorkshopBooking@InfoTech.com or call 1-888-670-8889 Ext.
3001. Your account manager will contact you and quote you the cost of a
workshop.
2. Book your workshop
A Workshop Coordinator will contact you to book a workshop planning call with one
of our Facilitators and arrange dates for your workshop. We can hold the workshop
in Info-Tech’s world-class facility in Toronto or at your location.
3. Plan your workshop
A Workshop Facilitator will contact you to go over the workshop outline and choose
the contents that are appropriate to your situation.
4. Participate in your workshop
Our experienced Workshop Facilitators will take your project team through your
tailored slides and exercises and will summarize all the workshop outputs into a
final report.
Free Beta Workshops

8. Info-Tech Research Group 8
Guided Implementation points in the Application Integration
project
Book a Guided Implementation Today: Info-Tech is just a phone call away and can assist you with your
project. Our expert Analysts can guide you to successful project completion.
Here are the suggested Guided Implementation points in the Application Integration project:
Section 1: Identifying business drivers for application integration
Get off to a productive start: Uncover business drivers for integration. Identify risks and
issues, along with mitigation plans to help bolster the program, and define KPIs that will be
used to measure the success of the program.
Section 2: Interpret the AI readiness assessment results and service inventory
Interpret your organization’s AI readiness assessment results. Identify gaps that will need to
be addressed in people, process, and technology as a vision and plan is developed.
Section 3: Evaluating the vision and patterns identification
Validate the requirements and architectural vision, and identify common integration patterns
that will accelerate implementation and promote consistency across the environment.
Validate architectural building blocks that will be required in the target environment.
Section 5: Developing the AI strategic plan
Validate the gap analysis, initiative composition, and strategic plan. Understand the
resourcing requirements and constraints.
To enroll, send an email to GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com or call 1-888-670-8889 and ask for
the Guided Implementation Coordinator.
This symbol signifies
when you’ve reached a
Guided Implementation
point in your project.

9. Info-Tech Research Group 9
Create a blueprint from a business driven application
integration strategy
 An overview of the primary elements and their
relationships to each other, including applications,
middleware, data, users, and external systems.
 A definition of principles, policies, and guidelines
that will influence the architecture development
and implementation.
 A definition of standards that will apply to the
technologies that will be used to implement the
architecture.
 Alignment of business drivers with technology
decisions.
 A set of common patterns and templates that can
be used for consistent integration solution design.
An architecture blueprint has the governing ideas and
candidate building blocks of an IT system, including:
Business
Drivers
• Existing AI practises
• Current KPIs/Benchmarks
• IT inventory
o Applications
o Services
o Legacy systems
o Data environment
o APIs
o Staff
A blueprint is the collection of all the work, planning, and investments
completed during strategy development.
• Architecture plan
• List of business drivers
• List of IT drivers
• List of technologies
o Middleware
o APIs
o Storage and servers
• Patterns used
• Scenarios used
• List of gaps to enable future
o People (AI specialist/architect)
o Process (SOA, BPM, EA, etc.)
o Technology (Middleware, etc.)
• List of potential vendors
• List of necessary evaluations
• Proof-of-concepts
• List of strategic initiatives
o Training
o Solution procurement
• List of dependencies
• List of constraints
• Roadmap
The patterns that we had developed were pretty generic and they could be adapted to the new
distributed applications as well as the mainframe applications...where the new process made it so [the
distributed and mainframe applications] could exist at the same time.
- Manager IT Application Technology, Aviation Industry

10. Info-Tech Research Group 10
Use the blueprint to formally document the AI strategy, to
increase your AI success
Formalized AI strategies consider business drivers and the
involvement of all key stakeholders at every phase. Deviating
away from a formal strategy increases the risk of incomplete or
ineffective initiatives.
An ad hoc integration approach is risky and costly because:
• Solutions will become unaligned with business drivers.
• Costs accumulate with “re-invent the wheel” initiatives every time
there is a new application, AI requirement, or solution.
• Inconsistent solution designs cost more to maintain and support.
• Lack of ownership of integration components results in finger
pointing when issues arise.
An Info-Tech survey defined “Ad Hoc Approach” and “Formal
Strategy” as the following:
Ad Hoc Approach: Respondent selected “We don’t do this at all,”
“Ad hoc approach; sometimes applied,” or “Ad hoc approach; usually
applied.”
Formal Strategy: Respondent selected “Standard process applied”
or “Documented and managed process applied.”
27%
60%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Ad Hoc Approach Formal Strategy
AISuccess(%)
AI Success Rate:
Ad Hoc Approach vs. Formal Strategy
Survey: Info-Tech Research Group; N = 72
Those who had a formal AI strategy doubled their success rate. Take the
necessary steps to create a formal AI strategy.
122%
Increase

11. Info-Tech Research Group 11
AI specialists have had to adopt new strategies and abandon point-to-point
integrations due to cloud, social integration, mobile, and big data disruptors.
Relying on hand coding and point-to-point integrations won’t
cut it anymore; give IT the strategy and tools they need
• Point-to-point integrations involving multiple solutions make it
difficult for the operations team to track down the source of the
problem. This obviously results in increased troubleshooting costs,
which over time can grow to be greater than the cost of designing an
AI strategy.
• IT wastes resources resolving issues and gets caught in the middle
when something goes wrong with the integration of applications. In
many cases it is the business (i.e. end users) that are the source of
the problem when no integration strategy is present.
• With no formal integration strategy, IT will not have control over
their integration solutions and will continue to lose ground to more
innovative end-user options, such as consumerized applications.
End users may resort to these options without IT consent,
increasing security risks.
• Multiple interface protocols
• Multiple message formats
• Routing and distribution of data
• Security at endpoints and in
transit
• Privacy
• Audit and logging
• Multiple integration frequencies
Ad hoc AI approaches increase
complexity in the following areas:
Don't believe anybody that tells you there is a single solution.
We spent lots of effort trying to go there...but there isn't a
single tool that does everything. There are plenty of vendors
that will tell you their tool does everything, but it is not true.
– Manager IT Application Technology, Aviation Industry
AI tools are not add-ons or
one-size-fits-all solutions.

12. Info-Tech Research Group 12
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a cardinal rule in a stable and leading edge IT environment.
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Toll Free: 1-888-670-8889

13. Info-Tech Research Group 13
Info-Tech Research Group Helps IT Professionals To:
Sign up for free trial membership to get practical
solutions for your IT challenges
www.infotech.com
 Quickly get up to speed
with new technologies
 Make the right technology
purchasing decisions – fast
 Deliver critical IT
projects, on time and
within budget
 Manage business expectations
 Justify IT spending and
prove the value of IT
 Train IT staff and effectively
manage an IT department
•“Info-Tech helps me to be proactive instead of reactive –
a cardinal rule in a stable and leading edge IT environment.
- ARCS Commercial Mortgage Co., LP
Toll Free: 1-888-670-8889
Click to learn more about how Info-Tech can help your organization.