How the debt accumulates
Most enterprises accumulate integration debt the same way: each new system gets connected to whichever other systems it needs at the time, one point-to-point link at a time. Individually, every connection was the fastest way to ship. Collectively, they become a mesh no one has a complete diagram of, where changing one system risks silently breaking three others.
Triage by business criticality
The framework we use starts with mapping data flows by business criticality, not by technical complexity — the goal is finding which integrations sit on the path of a revenue process, a compliance report, or a customer-facing workflow, since those are the ones worth re-platforming first. Everything else can often stay exactly as brittle as it is for now.
The fix is always the same shape
Introduce a governed integration hub for the high-criticality flows, retire the point-to-point links behind it one at a time, and resist the urge to re-architect everything at once. Integration debt took years to accumulate; it comes out in the same order.