Steps to

Advancing Enterprise Automation

in Your Organization

I N T E L L I G E N T A U TO M AT I O N A N D I N T E G R AT I O N
Driving automation across your
enterprise starts with integrating data and
applications. If your company is just heading
down the integration and automation process,
and you’re ready to get things moving, the
steps in this guide will help you take the
actions needed to drive automation with your
team, department, and across the enterprise.
Wherever you are in your journey, having a
plan and knowing what to do next can make
the change management process much easier
and far more organized. By following these
steps you’ll be on your way to a successful
automation journey.

10 STEPS TO ADVANCING ENTERPRISE AUTOMATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

 Step 1: Summarize Your Current Challenges
What’s not working? Where are there bottlenecks in data flows? Which processes,
applications and workflows feel clumsy and disconnected? Where are slow processes or
outdated manual ones preventing the business from moving quickly? What frustrates
employees in their system workflows? Don’t worry about every single issue — look for
patterns and the big picture. Where would automation (and thus integration) have the
biggest impact on user experience, the business’s ability to move fast in the marketplace,
and impact efficiency, cost, and revenue? Pick your top use cases. This is where you’ll
start.

Step 2: Identify Stakeholders

Who needs to be involved in this process? List the community of executives, decision
makers, and influencers who have a say in the vendor selection process, or who benefit
from connecting the enterprise and automating business processes. Check in with
individual users, too.

Step 3: Summarize Your Desired Outcomes

Next, outline your future state objectives to define how you want things to work when
the transformation is complete. This can be based on the top challenges you defined
in Step 1. A modern integration platform is supercharged with automation capabilities
that empower you and users to reduce friction in your process flows. Ask the teams you
support to validate the outcomes desired.

10 STEPS TO ADVANCING ENTERPRISE AUTOMATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

Step 4: Anticipate Future Changes
Expecting a solution to last forever is not realistic. But, your solution needs to be
able to evolve gracefully and accept updates and changes as you capitalize on future
opportunities and react to future market and industry changes. Deliberately expecting
change and baking evolution into your plans makes it more likely that your future
state solution will have staying power. It will also be more appealing to the Revenue
executives, as they’ll see long-term benefits from the investment.

Step 5: Establish Success Metrics

Identify the criteria for success and the necessary metrics for measuring it. Common
metrics related to application and data integration and enterprise automation projects
include a set timeline for implementation to avoid new service charges, the number of
users empowered to build their own integrations, or a specified reduction in time-to-
value from data integrations.

Step 6: Identify Applications, Data Sources, and Other

Systems of Record
Inventory the applications and other source endpoints in your environment that are part
of this plan. Group or categorize the applications according to how they relate to one
another (Human Capital Management, Finance, Marketing, Sales, and so on). Define the
needed data journeys. Resist the temptation to jump ahead to this step without laying
the groundwork.

10 STEPS TO ADVANCING ENTERPRISE AUTOMATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

 As you compare, make sure the
different options you consider meet
the following criteria:
 Delivers ease-of-use that empowers
high numbers of technical and non-
technical users — democratizing
integration
 Accelerates your business with
the shortest time-to-value from
integrations as possible, supported
by a track record of proven ROI and
TCO advantages
 Offers a broad selection of prebuilt
connectors
 Secures and encrypts data in motion,
with customer managed keys
 Supports data flows for low latency
operational needs, as well as
analytics needs
 Enables application integration and
data integration, with no-code and
low-code options
 Extends end-to-end: on-premises,
across multiple clouds, and across
multiple SaaS solutions » Enables you
to control where the data processing
takes place to ensure compliance
with regulatory requirements
10 STEPS TO ADVANCING ENTERPRISE AUTOMATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
Step 7: Identify Data Repositories, Analytics Platforms, and
Other Destination Endpoints
As part of the data fabric, if the modern integration platform must flow data to an
analytics platform, it’s important to ask whether the data will flow directly to a data lake
first or to a data warehouse. In this line of thinking (given that some new generation data
warehouses claim to be a data lake, too), the data lake is a separate repository that sits
outside of the data warehouse. There are pros and cons for having a data lake separate
from the data warehouse.
The pros include greater flexibility for user access. Not all groups that must work
with the data will want to work with the same data warehouse tools. The cons against
a separate data lake include added complexity (for example, multiple data platform
components and integration tools) and potentially data duplication and cost. The good
news is a modern integration platform can minimize the complexity issue by providing
a single platform for multiple integration options, eliminating the need for multiple,
point-solution, integration tools for the different data platform destinations.
Step 8: Evaluate Solutions
Now you’re ready to start evaluating solutions. For example, when you have a data
warehouse or data lake, along with application integration requirements, it’s all the more
important to evaluate a multi-function integration platform as a service (iPaaS) capable
of modern enterprise automation. A multi-function iPaaS enables application and data
integration, API development and management, and more, all in a single platform, single
middleware tool experience that dramatically simplifies data architectures.
Step 9: Research, Research, Research
Create a short list of contenders and get a demo to test how well a solution meets your
needs, current and future. Take advantage of free trials! Some vendors offer very low
friction solutions to get started, with offers such as prebuilt pipelines and a million
records loaded a month for free to popular cloud data warehouses.

Make sure to consider the costs involved in each. Look beyond the initial price offering to
the long-term costs. Remember, you may get a good entry deal, but it’s the total cost of
ownership over time that determines the true cost. Ask questions about what’s included
and try to compare apples to apples across vendors. Pursue a proof of concept (PoC) if
time allows.

Step 10: Execute

With this step, it’s go time! You’ve evaluated a short list. Now make the decision and put
your plan into action. With this step, think about and define your post-execution metrics,
including a plan to visualize the data via dashboards for the stakeholders identified in
Step 2.

Follow these 10 steps and you’ll be well on your way to a successful integration and
automation process.

Want to take a deeper dive? Explore the SnapLogic Special Edition

Enterprise Automation for Dummies® book or visit SnapLogic.com today.

10 STEPS
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