Between the Rock and the Hard Place - Conflicts in Implementing Integration Platforms

Abstract

The world is digitalizing in fast pace and the number of connections between different digital systems, i.e. integrations, is growing at the same time. That has created a need for more efficient integration management. For that reason, many companies are now implementing modern integration platforms to manage their external and internal integrations. Although these platforms are fast and easy to take in use technically, the main problems tend to be organizational. In this research, we study the experiences of the professionals, who have gone through an integration platform adoption project in their company recently. In our analysis, we found out that the technical challenges of the companies were easier to solve. However, if the organization does not have clear management, strategy or understanding on how to get the most from the new integration platforms, the capabilities of the integration platform are not used in their full scale. In the paper, we make visible the intervention points for a successful integration project.