Speed in business often means time-to-value – deliver value to your customers soon enough, and you can establish yourself as the market leader.
The fact is, though, your ability to deliver is in many ways limited by how quickly your technology can flex to meet a new opportunity or challenge. And your IT team greatly suffers from one major problem: a talent shortage.
One easy way to workaround is to bring your business users (with minimal technical competency) to the forefront and make integration work to your advantage.
As per a study by blue-chip recruiter Korn Ferry, by 2030, the United States faces losing $162 billion worth of revenues on an annual basis unless it finds more technologically skilled workers. That shortage translates into lower IT productivity, slower rollouts of new services and offerings, and compromised customer experiences.
Organizations that want to improve their ease of doing business and deliver value faster can’t resolve the IT shortage. Instead, they can empower their non-technical business users to build integrations so that IT is freed to focus on more high-value tasks.
Here is how companies can address the problem and empower their non-techies to manage data-driven operations:
Enable Citizen Integration
Companies can easily bypass the IT crunch by turning business users into citizen integrators. By doing so, even non-technical business users can create data connections and integrate new customers – thus freeing IT to focus on more important tasks and drive innovation.
Self-service integration solutions with a library of pre-built application connectors, drag and drop functionality, and intuitive screens and dashboards make it easy for the citizen integrators to build integrations and apps, sometimes all by themselves, others only needing IT to assist with the “last mile,” or final touches. Business users turned citizen integrators can create data onboarding connections in minutes by pointing and clicking through screens. With that, customers can be onboarded in minutes. That enables businesses to delight their customers faster and grow revenue.
Incorporate Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
By incorporating transformative technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, companies can empower their non-technical business users to execute data-driven operations with ease and speed. They can leverage AI-enabled mechanisms to quickly map complex, bi-directional data without seeking IT support.
Non-technical users can rely on artificial intelligence to understand and define data semantics, and then make data connections following those data rules. Additionally, they can recover, break down, and manage complex, multi-dimensional data and stream it in real-time to execute modern-day business transactions. At the same time, IT is freed up from everyday implementation but continues to serve in a high-level governance role, managing the integration environment while being freed from tedious and thankless API coding and EDI mapping. As a result, IT can focus on more strategic tasks instead of getting bogged down in data integration tedium.
When organizations deploy a citizen integrator approach and use machine learning and artificial intelligence, they can empower their non-technical business users to create data connections with customers in minutes – while freeing IT to focus on more high-value tasks. In other words, companies can empower their business users to handle the problem of IT shortage.