Decide what connects, what stays authoritative, and where the platform belongs.
Without an architecture, integration decisions become a series of local point-to-point connections that duplicate information, blur ownership, and make the operating model harder to govern.
Architecture before connectors.
Integration Architecture defines the platform boundaries, system-of-record decisions, information flows, security relationships, and integration patterns before implementation begins.
Create a target architecture for Applied SAFe® Platform that preserves clear ownership of data and systems while supporting the required operating-model use cases.
Twelve questions the engagement can settle.
- Where is the authoritative operating model?
- Which content stays in existing repositories?
- Which content is copied, indexed, referenced, or synchronized?
- Which systems hold authoritative engineering evidence?
- How does the platform connect to QMS and ALM?
- Which standards and policies are maintained where?
- How are findings and improvement actions exchanged?
- How do AI agents access process context?
- Where are identity and permissions enforced?
- Which components operate in which deployment environment?
- What are the integration failure boundaries?
- Who owns each interface?
Six steps from use cases to an implementation roadmap.
Define target use cases
Identify the platform workflows the architecture needs to support.
Map the current landscape
Document the relevant process, quality, engineering, identity, data, and infrastructure systems.
Define system responsibilities
Identify the authoritative owner for each major information type.
Design integration patterns
Choose appropriate approaches — APIs, connectors, MCP, events, synchronization, references, retrieval, or custom adapters.
Define security and deployment boundaries
Connect the integration design to identity, residency, network, and deployment requirements.
Build the implementation roadmap
Sequence the integrations around business value and technical dependencies.
- Current-state integration landscape
- Target architecture
- System-of-record model
- Information-flow diagrams
- Interface boundaries
- Security and identity relationships
- Deployment implications
- Integration roadmap
- Architecture decisions
- Avoid a landscape of point-to-point connections nobody owns.
- Give every major information type one authoritative home.
- Sequence integrations around value rather than availability.
- Settle the deployment implications before they become constraints.
Integration Architecture defines the broader enterprise design.
Customer-Specific Integration implements a particular interface or connector within that design.
Explore Customer-Specific Integration