The IT industry has reached a critical juncture. Numerous and equally diverse applications are available to business users to help them more quickly and efficiently get their jobs done—whether that entails onboarding new customers, managing partner networks or seamless cloud integration, and everything in between. While application integration has traditionally fallen under the umbrella of IT, business environments are becoming increasingly dynamic with the influx of cloud, mobile and social technologies in the enterprise.
It is imperative that organizations be flexible and nimble enough to create connections with other companies, customers and partners in order to remain competitive in the marketplace, however IT staff often have larger technology issues on their plates. It is not in the best interest of corporate IT, business users or the organization at large to allocate IT time and resources to facilitating these data connections at the expense of higher-level strategic IT initiatives.
Furthermore, in a recent report, Gartner forecasted that by 2017, at least 65 percent of new integration flows will be established without IT professionals’ oversight. The report also uses the Gartner-coined term “citizen integration” to coincide with the evolution of these modern business users. Citizen integration refers to business users leveraging the multitude of technologies at their disposal to create their own application integration solutions. This alone is also not a viable option, as IT must retain visibility into an organization’s data connections so as to ensure continuity and security across the network.
As a result, the current business environment has fostered the need for a hybrid integration approach – one that grants end users integration flexibility, while allowing IT to set the parameters in which business users can operate on the backend. This solution provides the best of both worlds; business users can securely automate their own data connections in real time, and IT is free to focus on larger, strategic initiatives.
As business user needs continue to develop, organizations that don’t adapt to the pace of innovation will quickly be left behind. The hybrid integration approach securely streamlines workflows for IT, allowing them to focus on strategic, higher order tasks. By enabling business users to manage basic integration requests, IT professionals are ensuring they can devote time and resources to larger issues – positioning their company for long-term growth.