How do I prevent our integration architecture from turning into a 'spaghetti' landscape?

A common challenge in IT architectures is that organizations want to enable more and more systems, applications, and data sources to communicate with each other, leading to the integration structure slowly transforming into a complex and difficult-to-manage 'spaghetti' landscape.

When connections are added ad hoc without central governance, direct point-to-point links between systems are created that are difficult to scale and maintain. This results in increased error-proneness, longer lead times for changes, and a lack of overview, causing the IT department to spend more and more time resolving integration issues instead of supporting strategic innovation.

An orchestration solution can help prevent this challenge by introducing a centralized layer where all integrations are managed and coordinated. Instead of direct links between systems, API management is used with a set of carefully chosen services, creating a central truth for essential entities such as customer, product, price, and order.

This results in a standardized, scalable, and reusable integration architecture where systems can collaborate flexibly without creating interdependencies.

Additionally, an orchestration solution provides monitoring and management functionalities, giving IT teams real-time insight into the status and performance of integrations. This enables problems to be identified and resolved more quickly, significantly reducing the risk of disruptions due to incorrect or inconsistent data.

By implementing a well-organized and coordinated orchestration solution, the integration architecture becomes future-proof and prevents it from becoming cluttered and inefficient.