Strategy for AnyPoint Platform implementation across multiple businesses
A tale of many options
As they say it is certainly a small world and that world gets smaller when you consider just the contacts that you have made across a long career in IT. I have been fortunate enough, as someone who worked in the contract consultancy market, to have worked for some great companies and met a large number of people across my consulting career. Now, I left the contracting consultancy world some time ago but every so often I come into contact with people that I worked with at that time and just recently that was the case with an old friend of mine and he had heard of me again through the MuleSoft Mentoring that I have done over the last year. When he contacted me again he had a very interesting question which we talked about for some time and was of a similar nature to another discussion I had had very recently with another ex-colleague. The two conversations prompted this article as I thought there were some topics that were worth sharing.
I hadn’t heard from this friend for a while because he had left the UK to work for a large firm that has many interests across the world. Like a lot of big organisations their name is not well known, and I’m not going to share it here because one, he didn’t tell me, and it’s not relevant to the discussion, but they are the ‘parent’ of a number of other businesses a bit like how insurance companies in the UK are well known but have a big company, underwriters, in the background supporting them.
In an arrangement like this you can imagine that they have a number of data integration challenges but in this case they were thinking about how MuleSoft could help them meet some of these challenges. The basic scenario was this.
The ‘parent’ organisation has a significant number of ‘child’ businesses some that work in a similar industry category and some that are completely different for instance a number of the businesses work in the automotive world with different brands of cars, some are financial businesses which, of course, are highly regulated and some pharmaceutical businesses which have different regulatory constraints. There are others in other categories but each have their own management structure but ultimately report to the ‘parent’ organisation.
As with pretty much any problem there are always many ways that a solution can be found but in order to work your way towards a solution you must first find the right questions to ask and then analyse the answers. In this case there were many questions that came to mind and I will try an cover some of them here in the hope that it will prompt some of the questions that you may need to ask in the same situation. Just as a spoiler, I won’t be providing any solutions to the architecture here as every situation will be different which, in my mind at least, makes the challenge that much more interesting.
Now put yourself in my position and what would be the first question that comes to mind? Well, in my view the first question is all about the desired business outcomes. Why are you considering the implementation of a data integration tool, what benefits do you expect to receive, what is the short and long term strategy and what are the constraints that you are working to, if any? (Finance is nearly always one I find)
In this particular circumstance the challenge was complicated by the nature of the businesses but actually, when you examine it at a high level, not one that I am unfamiliar with be it at a much smaller scale.
As with a lot of businesses there will often be a ‘central’ function either in terms of a parent organisation or in terms of a central department. It is most likely that the central department will have requirements for monitoring and managing the common aspects of the overall organisation such as HR, Payroll, financial reporting, possibly procurement and regulatory conformance reporting. In this situation a centralised implementation of the MuleSoft AnyPoint platform may be the ideal solution however this is not always the case. This is where the discussion on the implementation can get more challenging and more interesting.
Where a central function is required then a single implementation of the AnyPoint Platform may seem to be the obvious choice. However, we then need to look at the ‘business arms’ of the organisation and how they operate. Let’s look at some of the options that are available here and why we may use each of them.
Business Independence
If complete business independence is required then the simplest implementation of the MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform will be to have separate implementations for each business. With this you do, of course, get the advantage that each business can decide its own technical environment be that Cloud based, On Premise or Hybrid. This may be the best option if different regulatory or security requirements need to be met in each business. This does not mean that there cannot be some common data modelling, Canonical data model, where data needs to be shared amongst businesses or with a parent organisation.
Whilst giving business independence this may not be the most cost-effective way of implementing an organisation wide data integration tool.
Single implementation for Business Sectors
In the circumstance where the satellite businesses are in the same or common industry sector (Business Sectors 1, 2 and 3 in the above diagram) then the regulatory requirements in each sector, if applicable, will in all likelihood, be common. In addition, the data that each business is dealing with will be common in nature and therefore the data integration becomes less of a challenge than within each business sector. However, it may still be the case that each satellite business wishes to maintain a level of independence for either business or technical reasons.
Where each business has its own business practices and IT departments it may wish to operate its own technical processes and therefore a central implementation at the Business Sector level, of the MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform with independent MuleSoft Business Groups for each individual business may be a suitable solution.
In the diagram shown above we would therefore have a MuleSoft AnyPoint platform installation for Business Sector 1 with three Business Groups another for Business Sector 2 with four Business Groups and a third implementation where Business Groups would not be used at this stage, as there is only one business in that sector, but providing the possibility of adding additional Business Groups as more businesses belonging to that sector are added through, for example, acquisitions of the parent organisation.
Of course reporting or data integration requirements to the Parent organisation can still be achieved through common data models for the ‘common’ areas of the organisation.
The implementation of AnyPoint Platform Business Groups will allow each business to have a self-contained and managed set of resources under their own control and will allow the Business Group owners to have access to just the resources they own. However, Business Groups in the MuleSoft AnyPoint platform are a hierarchical structure and therefore the Business Sector implementation model will still have access to administration capabilities over each of the Business Groups but also, importantly, each Business Group will not have the ability to access the central Business Sector or any other Business Group.
In this way each business maintains its own processes and technical resources whilst the central Business Sector function remains in overall control. This of course means that the Administrative Business Group has to be either managed by one of the businesses in the Business Sector or the Administrative Business Group is owned at the Parent Organisation Level as shown below.
Hopefully now you can start to see that there are many options available here.
Parent organisation control
In the last section we looked at implementing the AnyPoint Platform by Business Sector but with the administration of each Business Sectors AnyPoint implementation being controlled centrally by the Parent Organisation. The obvious question then becomes if you are administrating the Business Sectors centrally then why not just have one implementation and have each Business Sector as a Business Group or a hierarchy of groups? This is, of course, a possible solution and would work quite well in most circumstances but again we have to return to the questions regarding security requirements and the degree of separation of the Business Sectors and Businesses within those sectors.
If separation is not required then central management of the AnyPoint Platform across the whole organisation may be the best option as it will reduce the overheads and possible confusions of dealing with separate Sectors and businesses. The argument could also be made that individual management teams at the Parent level should be available to manage each individual Business Sector implementation as they could be more familiar with their own individual Business Sector and therefore be in a better place to operate without confusion across the different implementations.
A last option to consider, for management at the Parent level, is to have a pure data management team with no MuleSoft skills who are responsible for the central operation, reporting and management using just the data received from the businesses. This structure would separate the technical skills required to operate whatever MuleSoft implementation is in place from the business processes required centrally by the Parent organisation.
Final thoughts
This article was never intended to provide solutions to the business problems being discussed. The variables, questions, answers and analysis would need to be the subject of a MuleSoft Catalyst engagement, at least that would be my recommendation, and the one I made to my colleague.
Here we have only scratched the very high surface of the questions and challenges that would need to be addressed. However, there is never any doubt in my mind that significant business benefit would result from implementing the MuleSoft AnyPoint platform in this type of scenario. In business, data is and always will be, of supreme importance. Decisions based on bad or inaccurate data can, and does have, serious impacts in the real world.
I hope in this article I have at least provoked thoughts on the challenges that I have described but as I have said in the past Winston Churchill got it right when he said ‘Perfection is the enemy of progress’ so try something and if it works keep doing it and if it doesn’t then do something else. Eventually you will find what works for you but base your initial thoughts on experience from those who have trodden the path before.
