Businesses today don’t have a second to waste. Every moment that goes by between an event, especially a customer-initiated event – and a response is a moment that sours your relationship, tanks your reputation, and drags down your bottom line.
As per experts at Unearthed Productions, while small businesses can use simple automated systems to tackle events automatically and respond accordingly, enterprises need a more robust system. They need event driven architecture.
While EDA sounds like such a simple, effective investment to make, it can be difficult to integrate. That’s why, to successfully add event driven architecture to your operations, you’ll want to use this guide:
Key Components of an EDA
What is event driven architecture, you may ask? It’s an integration model that lets applications in your system respond to events in real-time. It’s a form of automation that works like a domino effect to something happening, like a purchase, a click, or a financial transaction.
Every event driven architecture is made up of a few key components:
- Events: These are the events or occurrences that trigger responses in your system.
- Consumers: These are the systems or services that caused the event. An example of an event consumer is your eCommerce platform, or a device in the Internet of Things.
- Channels: These are the highways that connect your consumer to your wider system. They may be built-in, or, if you’re dealing with a legacy system, might be handled by APIs.
- Processing: Once your system gets the message it then needs to process the information and decide how best to respond. Some responses will be automatic. Others may need more processing power to determine. For example, a simple rule can be to automatically send out a personalized order confirmation email. More complex examples can be to flag a suspicious financial transaction for fraud.
How to Successfully Integrate Event Driven Architecture into Your System
EDAs are relatively straightforward systems in concept, but in reality they can end up feeling like monstrous beasts. This is particularly true when you get AI into the EDA mix.
The good news is that, no matter how large or complex your system is, you can use these steps to successfully integrate EDA into your existing system:
1. Evaluate Current Systems
You will want to map out your existing systems and workflows. You need to know how your system is currently handling these events, because it is. Whether it’s being done with a simplified automation system, or manually by your team, needs to be determined and mapped out so that you can then start to recognize your current workflows pain points.
Pay particular attention to where delays occur, where manual inventions are needed, processing speeds, and peak load bearing.
Once you have a full visual on your system, you can then start to work on solving those pain points.
2. Pick Out Key Events to Start With
It will take time to fold your entire system into an EDA. That’s why writing out all the events your business deals with is important. These can include:
- Customer actions like purchases, returns, inquiries, and transactions
- Operational actions like inventory updates, shipment tracking, or manufacturing delays
- Market events like price changes, competitor actions, and trends
List out all events in order of priority. Focus on the events that make the most difference to operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. This will help you get the biggest returns to your efforts, as quickly as possible.
3. Set Your EDA Goals and Objectives
Like with any undertaking it is essential that you set out clear goals, objectives, and KPIs. You may want to reduce processing time, or be able to handle sudden inrushes of customer interactions if you’re product or brand is a public darling all of a sudden.
Some goals can be long term, for example increasing customer satisfaction. Others can be more vague, such as improving your data analytics by connecting real-time market events to your pricing strategies.
4. Create an EDA Roadmap
Once you have your goals, and know the current state of your system and the events you deal with, it’s time to start creating a roadmap.
It is impossible to immediately roll out an EDA successfully. The larger your business, the longer it will take. That’s why you need to use phased rollouts that focus on specific systems or events first.
You will also want to set out milestones and timelines. This will help ensure your teams stay on track, and will also help you maintain leadership buy-in for the project.
5. Choose Your Event Processing Framework
You do not need to create the framework for your EDA yourself. You can instead rely on third-party software to help you handle processing logic. These frameworks make it easier for your system to address events and respond accordingly.
Part of this process will be to understand what these frameworks need to talk to your wider system. These tools are known as integration tools, and will include a mix of APIs, message brokers, or an entire integration platform, depending on your current system and the EDA software you use.
6. Monitor and Test Your Efforts
Every single undertaking you bring to the table needs to be vigorously tested and monitored. You will want to track essential KPIs like processing times, customer satisfaction, and even number of errors.
Tracking this information and comparing it to previous system results can help you track the ROI of your EDA.
If you follow-up with A/B testing strategies, you can also adapt the specific approach you take with your EDA, and it will out the more successful approach on a wider scale.
A few of the factors you’ll want to test include the latency speeds (the delay between event and action), system scalability, and even error handling. Work on removing errors as soon as possible, and then use analytics to improve your approach.
Monitoring and testing your results is how you can continue to make improvements to your overall system, and keep it current with the latest IT and market trends. Just remember you will need to train your entire team on a few key concepts, so that everyone can be on the same page on how to use and work alongside your EDA.
