A multitude of benefits exist with regards to business users implementing their own desired applications, services and data connectivity including saving both time and money across the organization.
There is a disruptive trend among business users in finding applications that simplify their day-to-day workflows. In fact, employees are leveraging an average of 20 – 30 SaaS based applications regularly and a recent Gartner report predicted that by 2017, at least 65 percent of new integration flows will be developed outside the control of IT. Rather than look at this industry change as a hurdle, organizations that can leverage this insight and position business users with self-service tools while minimizing risk will ultimately experience large boosts in productivity and efficiency.
The ideal solution that strikes this balance will empower business users to perform tasks such as customer and partner onboarding themselves, while remaining within the purview of IT.
When business users can perform these application integration tasks themselves, they can respond to customers and partners more quickly; reducing downtime, missed opportunities and the resulting lost revenue. Not to mention, it is more cost effective across the organization to empower business users with self-service tools as opposed to routing every request through IT. Additionally, IT will be free to focus on higher order, strategic-level initiatives instead of spending valuable time addressing integration requests that users could be handling themselves.
Considering that the current business landscape is characterized by an ever-present need to cut costs while increasing productivity, citizen integration allows business users to act independently, without needing to wait for IT assistance. In turn, the business’s goals of heightened efficiency are met and ultimately benefit the company’s overall bottom line.