Time is of the essence. Enterprises are pivoting to respond to ever-lasting changes in strategy and interaction, posed by multiple technological trends such as self-service integration, cloud computing, mobile, and SaaS.
During the entire process, IT holds the responsibility of implementing those responses and ensuring they can beat the competition. But there is an emergence of myriad forces and IT teams only has a finite number of resources to get all jobs done on time.
Consequently, we see that a gap originates between the emerging needs and IT’s capacity to deliver on those needs. Over time, this gap increases at an accelerated pace because IT is unable to handle the requirements and also add new resources or augment capacity and productivity – thereby creating the IT delivery gap. To increase productivity and better close the IT delivery gap, companies must consider these top changes:
#1: Reconsider your current approach to integration
In many organizations, integration is still not really a strategic discipline. Business users usually leverage a point-to-point approach to create integrations in a rudimentary way.
A lot of companies are witnessing issues with point-to-point. The rapid movement towards mobile applications and other disruptions have rendered this approach a constraining approach to integration. Simply because the point-to-point integration approach allows one-to-one connections between data, applications, and devices – triggering the exponential rise of endpoints. This results in a lot of technical debt and a brittle architecture because systems become tightly coupled together. As a result, IT teams feel burdened and stray away from more high-value tasks. This creates huge costs for companies because IT teams are unable to respond to changing business needs without delay.
As companies take a self-service integration approach, they can move beyond the constraints of point-to-point integration by leveraging pre-built application connectors, AI-data mapping, and intuitive screens & dashboards to connect and monitor data connections and integrate new customers. Even non-technical business users are enabled to do that, freeing IT to focus on more strategic tasks and be more productive.
#2: Change the way the IT team or other technical teams are organized
After discussing ways for rethinking integration approaches, it’s time that we talk about transforming IT. Enterprises must consider changing the way IT teams are organized to drive productivity and easily close the delivery gap.
By taking a self-service integration approach, business users (with albeit minimal technical expertise) can onboard and integrate customer data in minutes instead of months. In the process, it empowers Central IT, Line of Business (LoB) departments, and digital innovation teams to drive innovation-driven tasks. This promotes consumption and collaboration and fosters self-reliance while increasing delivery through feedback and metrics.
#3 Make changes in your delivery model
In the majority of companies, all the delivery burden is laid on central IT. For improving productivity, companies can adopt franchising. Through that technique, reusable assets are built. By building reusable assets and enabling self-service, companies need not produce all projects themselves.
The fundamental point here is that IT must focus on production as much as consumption. Assets can be reused for driving projects. At the same time, these assets need also be discoverable, and this enables developers to self-serve them in completing projects at the speed of business.
In order to realize this approach, companies can adopt a self-service-powered integration approach to create connections in minutes. And IT teams will have access to reusable assets to use, enabling them to enhance productivity.
Clearly, most organizations are suffering from the IT delivery gap and finding ways to enhance the productivity of development teams. By adopting a self-service integration approach, business users can create connections and IT can drive more strategic tasks, thus improving overall productivity.