Customers – Digital Transformation with IBM API Connect
By Isabella Morgan / December 11, 2023 / No Comments / IBM and Microsoft Exams, Technical requirements
One constant theme in digital transformation frameworks is the focus on customers. The Customers category lists items that are important in getting to know your customer’s needs, desires, and ability to provide feedback (good or bad).
As you learned previously, people’s passions can provide positive or negative results. So, for example, if customers would like to sign up for your application, make sure the self-service capabilities are implemented. Ensure that the approach is streamlined and proper customer service capabilities (such as reset password) are easy to perform. Perhaps consider chat sessions and/or alternative ways to access your application (mobile, iPad, kiosk, and so on) so that the customer feels important.
As you look into building digitally, utilize this category to verify you have considered and addressed those items and have communicated to the other teams how they will be accomplished.
Processes and performance
Having a focus on the customer also leads to considerations to improve processes and performance. Delivering a new digital product should include communications throughout the organization so that everyone is on board. One critical aspect of digital transformation is ensuring that changes and improvements are delivered quickly. Your customers do not want to wait for extended periods for new features or improvements. Investing in an agile delivery mechanism, as well as considering how application scaling can improve performance at peak times for seasonal events, will help you out here.
You should also consider where you would like to implement your digital solutions. Considerations should be taken into account for hybrid implementations so that you can take advantage of cloud capabilities/efficiencies such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, as well as capitalize on your on-premises assets and solutions.
While digital transformation is generally about applications and solutions being executed effectively, what it really takes is people. Many of the implementations could include new technologies and platforms. Ensuring your teams are trained on new technologies and communication flows between organizations is critical.
Business cases
One potential stumbling block when adopting digital transformation is the misunderstanding that one single implementation of a digital project doesn’t make your entire organization digitally transformed. A digital island is just that – an island.
To be an effective digitally transformed enterprise, you will need to be constantly focused on the holistic view. You should be thinking about the enterprise integration of digital implementations working cohesively together with common products, shared decision making, and creative design thinking. Your implemented digital services should be shared. Don’t build digital islands. Focus on blurring silos and folding in and adopting existing digital successes.
As a reminder of all of the common considerations, the following word cloud diagram can be referenced at your leisure:

Figure 1.3 – Digital framework word cloud
It’s time to get technical and dive into API-led frameworks.
Hybrid reference architecture
Working within a framework will give you some themes to follow when you are just starting. Taking those themes, you can now map them to an architecture that will provide you with the flexibility to implement them.
The following hybrid reference architectural diagram provides you with a holistic look at the components you can use to bring your digital solution together:

Figure 1.4 – Hybrid reference architecture
This reference diagram depicts the intersection of your on-premises applications and services and new or migrated functionality to cloud infrastructures.
The on-premises functionality (at the lowest level) would be your existing applications utilizing SOA, Java, messaging, and web services, all of which will be coordinating and managing your system of records.
As you begin extending this functionality with external partners, you begin integrating with another implementation layer that provides APIs, events, and various ways of exchanging data. This layer will operate with general-purpose APIs, or what is called backend for frontend (BFF) APIs. Introduced by Sam Newman, this design strategy reduces bloated services with too many responsibilities into a tightly coupled specific user experience API that is maintained by the same team as the UI.
The benefit of BFF is this API layer, which can now be implemented by your digital teams as a new service offering in the public or private clouds.
With API management, these new APIs can be exposed to various channels with proper monitoring, governance, and security. These system APIs are the workhorses within this architecture.
With the reference architecture in place, you can now explore the capabilities of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on cloud service providers, build new applications using Platform as a Service (PaaS), and incorporate and integrate with other Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.