One Way to Avoid the Blame Game Caused by Platform Integration Failures

Swedish metals, mining and smelting company Boliden has approximately 40 connected large applications and close to 400 integrations to manage. The integrations team estimates that the company produces around 400,000 messages per day. With the help of Nodinite’s tool, Boliden can proactively monitor all compatible platform integrations and messages. Nodinite is also an effective way to avoid the blame game between different departments or teams that can caused by platform integration failures.

Before they began using Nodinite, the tasks performed by the integration team at Boliden were almost seen as a black hole. Data went in but it was hard to know exactly what happened to it inside the integrations or how data would come out. This uncertainty created a lot of stress for the integrations team as they were expected to find failed messages or show what the data looked like in missing messages.

Integration failures were a big part of the integration teams’ daily job pre-Nodinite.

After installing Nodinite, the integrations team rarely receive questions related to missing messages due to integration failures. Data is very transparent, from when it flows in and flows out. It’s been a good tool to help the company become more professional.

“It is more than a monitoring tool. We use it for everything”. Martin Lilja System Integration Specialist, Boliden.

Minimizing Business Logic to Reduce Integration Failures

In an integration platform there are always business rules and logic. Boliden actively tries to minimize the business logic inside the integrations. In their experience, if something goes wrong with an integration, 99% of the time it is because business logic or rules are causing the problem.

Using Nodinite, they now have the data to prove it.

The company began implementing integrations in production in agile batches instead of having one large release across the organization. By doing this, Boliden noticed that it is not often that a problem occurs in the integration platform because of bad coding. Incorrect coding can otherwise create unstable environments.

With Nodinite’s help, Boliden discovered that nearly all the time that an error occurs, it is because the business side is sending data incorrectly. When data is not accepted, the integration fails.

Getting the Business Involved as Stakeholders

Boliden has also worked hard to distinguish between the data in the integration platform that the IT department owns and the data that the business-side owns. The company did this so that departments outside of IT will know and understand the data structure.

By adding a layer between when data is accepted or rejected in the integration bus Boliden can also determine whose responsibility it is to do a root cause analysis whenever an integration-related problem occurs.

Boliden has involved other parts of the organization to the extent that external departments and business units have role-based access to Nodinite. This way teams and business units, outside of the IT department, can figure out for themselves what has happened and solve potential issues on their own. One action, for instance, that external departments can do is to resend messages on their own without notifying the IT department.

Boliden’s IT philosophy is that errors should always be fixed at the root. In other words, instead of treating the symptom, the causes of errors should also be fixed. Messages should not be re-sent on integration platforms; they should first be corrected in the sending system.

Part of Boliden’s successful strategy can be attributed to the fact that there are Nodinite stakeholders across the organization.

Nodinite Chosen to Confirm that Messages were Being Delivered

Initially, Nodinite was chosen to confirm that messages were being delivered to a receiving application. Before Nodinite came into use, a lot of people contacted the IT department to say that they did not receive messages. The integrations team that worked with integrations knew that messages were being delivered but they needed a tool to prove this to other parts of the business.

This is why Boliden selected Nodinite.

After implementation the IT department discovered other ways to use it and people began to see its power. Initially, Nodinite was iconsidered a small project but after realizing its benefits, usage grew fast. The IT department started getting questions about Nodinite. Thus, the decision was made to undertake a project to expand its use to all integrations in Boliden. It became the standard framework to use for all the logging and monitoring of integrations.

Nodinite Yielded Rapid Return on Investment (ROI)

Boliden has received great value from Nodinite. It is now possible for non-IT specialists to better understand the problems and challenges faced by the integrations team. Non-IT operations teams and departments across the organization can solve their own problems. There is also a general understanding across the organization that the data being sent impacts other systems.

One of the outcomes of spreading Nodinite across the business is to change some of their internal processes. In the long run this helps Boliden become a more professional business.

In a sense, it is fortunate that Boliden is a progressive company. Once a few people in the business side got hold of Nodinite, its use began spreading rapidly. Today Boliden use Nodinite when they develop new integrations.

Boliden initially estimated that they would receive a positive Return on Investment (ROI) one year after investing in Nodinite. Yet they achieved an ROI much faster than that! It was achieved within three-to-four months.

Managing integrations requires a lot of time and effort. If this can be done well, as Boliden’s integration team has proven, then companies can save a lot of time and money. As mentioned at the top of the article also, Nodinite is also a means to avoid the blame game between different departments or teams that can caused by platform integration failures.

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