Cornerstones of a digital ecosystem - part 1

Lingua Franca : The ability to communicate between different individuals and cultures is the core concept to translate into building a digital ecosystem.  Unless you are in an environment where you have been able to create everything yourself and somehow manage to keep a level of consistency across time in that implementation you will run into the problem of differences in exchanging data between systems.  Each application / vendor had a different approach to their implementation, whether it was caused by technology selection or just in philosophical design differences.  Think of the number of applications and vendors that even a small organization has in place to support different business functions and you will understand that even small differences multiply to become significant amounts of work to manage that integration.

In the digital space today the lingua franca, we have the commonality of REST and Open Api Specification as the alphabet but it is still necessary to compose that into ideas that become the language.  As we formulate those ideas we can transcribe that into object models and interactions to describe our business language.