In this episode, Markus Zirn and Suresh Jaganathan explore the power of a federated delivery model, sharing insights from Suresh’s transformative work at Unilever and Roche. They discuss the benefits of this approach, like scalability, flexibility, faster time to market, and improved compliance. They highlight the importance of a product mindset and the role of federated delivery in fostering innovation and business value in large enterprises.
Adopt federated delivery for scalability: Enhance scalability and flexibility by decentralizing integration tasks. Train teams to handle integrations independently, while maintaining central oversight for governance.
Create a marketplace for reusable assets: Build a central marketplace with reusable APIs, templates, and tools. Encourage teams to share and utilize these resources, fostering collaboration and efficiency.
Embrace a product mindset for APIs and events: Shift to treating APIs and events as products. Assign owners to manage them with ongoing updates, customer feedback, and continuous improvement.
Empower teams through integration champions: Establish integration champions to support federated teams with training, ongoing support, and regular workshops, ensuring successful implementation and continuous learning.
Currently working at Roche Global IT, Suresh leads the Digital Core Integration Platform and team within 'Future ERP,' where he defines the overall integration strategy and ensures that a fit-for-purpose integration ecosystem is established and a robust operating framework is in place.
Previously, Suresh spent 10 years at Unilever Global IT as Lead Manager of Adaptive Integration, handling cloud integration, hybrid integration, and API capability. In this role, he was responsible for the Adaptive Integration Strategy, roadmap, setup, IT business partnering, DevOps, TCO, vendor management, and landscape management. He also managed the overall integration strategy at Unilever.
In an earlier role at Unilever, Suresh managed integration operations globally (A2A, B2B, MFT, ETL), projects in ERP solutions, and vendor management across 15+ Asia Pacific countries. Before joining Unilever, he worked in an IT services company as a supply chain functional consultant and ERP Deployment Manager.
“Enablement is not a one time fire and forget exercise. It is a continuous exercise. So you need to have integration champions in your integration center for enablement team so that integration champions continuously engage with all the federated teams. They are not like policemen. It is more like a customer success person. So they engage with that federated teams to continuously educate them.”