IT innovation is disrupting industries across the board, and in no space is this more apparent than software integration. There has been little to no innovation in integration software for the past 15 years, as most integration platforms have been designed to be used by engineers using developer tools. However, those days are over.
Business environments are dynamic and need to be flexible enough to create connections with other companies at a moment’s notice, but Corporate IT has larger technology issues on their plates. In fact, the deluge of integration requests is so continuous, that if IT were handle each request, they would have no time left to handle any other, higher order issues.
One particular area companies struggle with is the onboarding of new partners and customers. A tremendous amount of legwork and time is required by IT to set up connections and secure data mapping, however IT doesn’t have the bandwidth to make integration requests a priority. The entire onboarding process can take from six weeks up to four months, resulting in lost revenue.
Upending this traditional approach to integration is a trend known as citizen integration, which basically entails business users performing tasks like onboarding and data mapping themselves. This approach to integration holds the promise of major benefits for organizations. If business users can create B2B data connections in minutes, the entire onboarding process is cut by several weeks, resulting in more revenue, faster.
However, in order to empower business users to perform integration tasks, IT must innovate. The traditional, systematic approach to integration isn’t flexible enough to accommodate business users, and so a more adaptive method should be implemented. While it’s critical that IT retains visibility into data connections being made, it’s equally as critical that IT adapts to the fast-paced nature of business.
In fact, here at Adeptia we recently conducted a survey around critical success factors for IT in 2015 and found that 75 percent of the IT organizations surveyed reported that they would save $11 to $20 thousand per month if IT innovated their current practices to shorten the time it takes to create B2B integrations to days instead of weeks or months.
While the traditional approach to integration has held steady over the past 15 years, the time has come for IT to innovate in order to stay competitive.