Building your integration strategy in six weeks

Decisions and solutions related to integrations are often made on an ad hoc basis – until the growing complexity starts to slow down development and drive up maintenance costs. We interviewed Digia's Martin Helin about why an integration strategy is needed, what questions it answers, and how one is created in practice.

How do you recognize the lack of an integration strategy?

"When ad hoc solutions are made without a proper strategy, sooner or later various problems are encountered. These may relate to information flow, for example, where similar solutions are implemented across different units or overlapping technology is acquired, which is, of course, not efficient.

We see a lot of duplicate work being done in different parts of organizations. In such cases, this extra work can be reduced. In addition to complexity, the lack of a shared vision inflates software and licensing costs and increases production maintenance costs at the expense of new development.

Sometimes the customer already has an integration platform, for example, but during new systems procurement, the vendor is not required to utilize the already existing platform for integrations. In other words, the vendor is allowed to implement integrations in their own way with their own tools. This opens the door to disparate implementation methods, and possibly new technologies or even fully customized solutions, which can easily lead to vendor lock-in. Maintaining and monitoring customized solutions can be challenging, especially over time: problems often go undetected and cannot be responded to automatically and swiftly.

From a regulatory perspective, GDPR and NIS2, as well as other industry-specific regulations, impose obligations that are challenging to fulfill without a strategy. You can recognize the lack of a strategy when, for example, new databases containing personal data emerge as part of an integration solution in unexpected places due to ad hoc approach – databases that haven't been recognized and aren't covered by centralized governance.

In other words, the lack of an integration strategy causes various costs, delays, and inefficiencies in the organization’s operations."

What does a good integration strategy cover?

"A good integration strategy makes future integration development clearer and more straightforward. It also provides guidelines for future procurements that can reduce the amount of work that needs to be purchased or done in-house. Additionally, it helps unify the operating models and platforms that have already been adopted.

A successful integration strategy benefits the entire organization, meeting its needs while remaining as simple as possible.

The strategy should also address the most sensible way for this organization to organize integration work: should it be done in-house, with a partner, or perhaps with a multi-vendor team? And what implications follow from that choice?

In practice, a good integration strategy defines how the organization wants to handle integrations from now on, and having this strategy makes practical decisions easier."

Why is integration strategy such a timely topic right now?

"When we think about developing digital services, there's often a desire to run quick experiments – now more than ever. Even if an experiment targets a small audience or is intended only for internal use, it may still require extensive integration implementation.

If the integration strategy and thus the foundation for development aren't in order, all tasks may end up going through centralized IT, which can be completely overloaded with other work. This creates a bottleneck for business development and rapid experimentation.

The demand for real-time data has generally increased. Previously, it was typical to run batch jobs overnight and update reports once a day. Today, that isn't enough for many organizations, as real-time data may also be used to control production operations. It's therefore important to understand, as part of the strategy, what the organization's needs for real-time data are and how to meet them.

Struggles with data are also highlighted by AI. AI tools require accurate and up-to-date data from various sources. Without a proper strategy, this can become a concrete barrier to utilizing AI in the organization."

What doesn't an integration strategy address?

"The strategy phase typically doesn't take a position on technology choices. For that, we have architecture and technology-related subsequent steps, which can be continued directly after the strategy is created.

The integration strategy specifically aims to create the broad guidelines that the organization will follow in the coming years so that it can grow and operate efficiently."

Why should you involve a partner in developing your integration strategy?

"We often encounter situations where organizations have tried to define these matters on their own. However, we have hundreds of customers, truly deep expertise across many industries, and the shared experience of 60 integration architects, so we can quickly bring additional depth and effective solutions to our customers.

Thanks to our established practices, we can get started effectively, and six weeks is a realistic timeframe for creating an integration strategy.

It's a very small investment compared to the significant and immediate results it delivers."

Want to learn more?

Explore our integration services and get in touch. We’ll help you build change-capable architectures.

You're also welcome to join our webinar on January 27th, 2026: AI in integrations