Best practices and standards-driven architecture to enable governed autonomy for executing multiple initiatives across the organization

What is Architecture & Design?

The number of projects will continue to grow over time as you look to become efficient by automating business processes across your organization. Some of these automation projects may depend on each other, where a change to one can impact several other automations. 

You may also have multiple teams building automations for individual business needs, leading to similar or overlapping automations due to a lack of reuse. Often, these automations are built in silos to keep up with the business demands for rapid solutions that address current requirements and not with a long-term view of business performance needs. 

All of these can result in complex integration architecture, higher cost of implementation, unpredictable risks with changes, and longer time to value. Most organizations face some or all of these challenges. The reason is the lack of consistent standards for designing automations and an approach to overarching enterprise architecture.

Architecture & Design is about providing best practices and a standards-driven systematic approach to enable governed autonomy to different teams for executing multiple initiatives across the organization.

A point-to-point recipe may be suitable if only two systems are involved in a business process. An event-driven architecture may be more efficient in enabling the ability to react in near real-time to different business events. Other architecture styles such as data hub or API-led may be suitable for consistently sharing data across multiple internal systems or external partners. Your enterprise architecture will continue to evolve with changing business needs, and you may have to use or even combine different architectural styles in your organization.
 

The following architecture and design best practices can help your teams select the suitable automation architecture and enable them to address business demands with a lower total cost of ownership and faster time to value.
 

• Identify and establish a reference architecture that guides the selection of the right automation design depending on factors such as the scope of automation in end-to-end business processes, reusability in future projects, performance requirements etc. 
• Establish and embed automation design reviews as part of your automation lifecycle management process to ensure consistency across multiple teams and initiatives. You can start with the Workato Recipe Review checklist as a starting point for defining your automation review process.

The increased focus on architecture and design can help your organization in multiple ways:

• Execution agility: Well-designed architecture can help you keep pace with digital initiatives by reducing the impact of changes, making automations a source of competitive advantage.
• Efficiency: Streamlined and organized automation assets promote reuse for faster development and eliminates waste due to overlapping projects.
• Implementation cost: Reduce the total cost of ownership and attain higher scalability through platform consolidation and modernization initiatives.

GEARS Assets