What they need to do is flip the script. Instead of only looking at the input side of these systems and how to plug into older systems not designed for it, look at the output side of everything that’s built and make sure it is api first so future projects can integrate much easier.
At the city of antwerp we flipped over in 2015 from a typical assortment of poorly integrated consultant-built monoliths to a microservices api-first approach. It became a hard requirement that all functionality provided by new systems had to be offered by a documented api, and most of the newly built systems dogfood their own api’s from the ui. In 5 years this caused a fundamental shift, where it gave us the ability to set up a covid contact tracing app for schools in weeks, because it was mostly the piecing together of well documented and battle tested api’s.
At the city of antwerp we flipped over in 2015 from a typical assortment of poorly integrated consultant-built monoliths to a microservices api-first approach. It became a hard requirement that all functionality provided by new systems had to be offered by a documented api, and most of the newly built systems dogfood their own api’s from the ui. In 5 years this caused a fundamental shift, where it gave us the ability to set up a covid contact tracing app for schools in weeks, because it was mostly the piecing together of well documented and battle tested api’s.