How businesses can keep their fingers on the pulse of change – Let the users speak!
The brain operates in real-time, people operate in real-time, events and the effects of events happen in real-time – and now thanks to event-driven architecture (EDA) and the instant fix of the Open API economy, businesses can, for the first time, truly operate in real-time. This article draws on brand-new research gleaning critical insights from global IT professionals on what it takes to successfully deploy event-driven architecture (EDA) across the enterprise, delivering value to employees and customers and the business as a whole.
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The world really is event-driven. Big cloud providers and tech analysts agree, including Amazon’s CTO Dr Werner Vogels who made the point in his “the world is event-driven” keynote speech at the AWS re: Invent in December 2022. And, now groundbreaking new research from IDC shows 90% of the world’s largest companies will use real-time intelligence by 2025, powered by event-streaming technologies.
In the aftermath of recent global and geopolitical events, more and more businesses – from retail and financial services to manufacturing and energy & resources – understand the need to identify and react in real time to key issues throughout all of their product lines, supply chains, and geographies. The word is out – EDA is now “crossing the chasm” and going mainstream.
Five Steps on the Journey to Eda Success
Many companies are well on their EDA journey, while others are just starting out. Their collective experience is vital to building a roadmap to reap the benefits of event streaming technologies. In a recent survey of over 300 enterprise IT professionals in North America, Asia, and Europe, all of whom work for large companies that are implementing or considering EDA. The results are quite telling – an overwhelming 93% of respondents at companies that have deployed EDA across multiple use cases said EDA has either met or exceeded their expectations. In addition to technical advantages from EDA, most businesses also see clear business benefits: 23% of respondents reported increasing productivity; 22% said better customer acquisition; and 18% saw revenues increase as a result of their EDA efforts.
But what’s the secret behind such success? What are the things to do and things to avoid? Survey respondents graciously stepped up here, providing five key considerations to delivering EDA success, based on their own experiences of adopting and implementing the technology.
Securing C-Suite Support From Leadership, Lines of Business, and IT Departments Is Critical – Particularly During the Initial Stages
Expanding the footprint of an Event-Driven Architecture across the enterprise is a journey, and every journey starts by assembling those that are critical to its overall success.
Business sponsorship and engaging key stakeholders is vital, especially in the early days of EDA adoption – 56% of respondents in the early EDA stages cited this as a priority, when ROI and business benefits may not be immediately clear.
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Thankfully, as maturity increases and business impact and use cases become more apparent, the need for explicit business support becomes less critical – 35% of respondents at an advanced stage of EDA rollout felt C-level support was critical.
The impact of well-aligned C-suite, operational, and technical teams is reflective of business-level digital maturity too. It comes as no surprise that those respondents with higher levels of EDA maturity also have higher levels of overall digital maturity, including the digital strategy and change management support needed to sustain digital business initiatives.
It Support Is Also Key to Address Technical Complexity Head On
Be Prepared for Increasing Complexity
As EDA becomes more pervasive across an organization, the associated demands on IT become more sophisticated, requiring a deepening of EDA skills in the IT organization, notably with developers and architects. 36.1% of respondents cited the lack of skills to execute EDA as a hurdle to adoption. Approaches to logging, governance, and oversight (30.7%) can also become increasingly challenging and must be thought through carefully.
This is where EDA providers themselves need to step up to the plate to provide adequate training and a certification path for architects and developers looking to gain the fundamental knowledge and skills to design and implement event-driven systems. This should include technical details such as understanding the various design patterns for Event-Driven Architecture, microservices choreography vs orchestration, the saga pattern, and RESTful microservices. Education should also clearly define and demonstrate key concepts and tools for EDA success, such as event portal, topic hierarchy best practices, and event mesh.
Communication Is Key
Communicate the Benefits of EDA Across the Organization to Create Alignment Between It and the Business
It is essential to take the company with you along the entire journey. The research showed the bumps in the roadmap. In the early stages of EDA maturity, lack of understanding of EDA benefits and inconsistent buy-in are the most frequently cited organizational challenges (38%). As organizations progress to a centralized EDA status, cost concerns (42%) and finding the right use cases (36%) can hamper success. More advanced stages of EDA also cite a lack of understanding of EDA benefits (45%), and cost concerns (39%) but change resistance (38%) becomes a major hurdle.
Continuous focus on change management and communicating business benefits is vital to overcoming these challenges. The core group of invested stakeholders who began the journey must band together to clearly and consistently demonstrate the value of EDA to other areas of the business on a regular basis.
The Yardstick of EDA Success Changes and Adoption Grows – Make Sure You Move With the Times
The right measures of EDA success in the early days of adoption are not the same measures as EDA adoption grows over time.
Fewer EDA-mature organizations cited “cost reduction” (23%) and “number of projects completed” (31%) as top measures of success. In the medium term, after two or three use cases, most organizations saw “operational stability” along with “number of projects” to measure success. Further, after broad adoption, “increased revenue” (43%), “operational stability” (32%), and “amount of resiliency” (30%) become the more important measures.
This changing set of measures is reflective of the maturity curve of EDA adoption across multiple applications within a business’s ecosystem. A business is truly operating in real-time when deploying EDA across key customer-facing, employee-facing, and supplier-facing organizations. This is where revenue is being generated in high volumes, organization-wide – hence stability and resilience become key to ensuring things continue to run smoothly on what can often be a global scale across hundreds of sites or product lines.
Drive EDA Success With the Support of Partners
It’s All About Effective Change Management, and Not Going Soft in the Middle
To accelerate business and technical benefits and reduce the impact of challenges, survey respondents cited “finding a supportive partner to assist with the implementation of EDA” (37.7%) as a critical consideration. Partnerships and product integrations with the providers of preferred business software and SaaS services can make it easy to event-enable an organization.
Given the amount of new technical skills and learning previously cited, this can provide peace of mind for organizations taking their first steps on the journey to EDA.
EDA isn’t just a change in IT architecture, it’s a mindset that applies to modern business leadership organization-wide. To keep the momentum during the journey, respondents also noted the use of a robust change management plan that “ensures coordinated middle management support” (35.1%), as they are typically accountable for getting work delivered and reporting across the organization.
Respondents cited that top-down or bottom-up change management sometimes misses the tactical needs of middle managers. As a result, management needs to integrate its people and digital systems to join together in shared decision-making.
The March to Event-Driven Architecture Is On
The findings of this InfoBrief demonstrate that event-driven architecture is now the de facto standard way businesses are becoming real-time. By understanding these five key requirements as they deploy their EDA journey, organizations across a range of industries can unlock the full potential of real-time movement of their critical business data.
