As the business landscape has grown more competitive, companies have come to rely on digital innovation and transformation to cut through the noise and stay relevant. This trend has gained momentum with consumers’ and businesses’ digital needs changing due to disruption.
The needs and demands of customers have shifted, regulatory requirements have changed, supply chains have reorganized, and decision-making has accelerated with surprising velocity. All these changes have increased the weight of responsibility on IT teams and developers.
Despite the need to invest more in digital innovation, as we embark on a journey filled with uncertainty and unpredictability, many companies fail to digitally transform and innovate at the required speed. Moreso, IT teams have a large amount of pressure to deliver new digital capabilities quickly, with fewer resources, and at a fraction of the cost. So the question arises – how can companies make constant efforts to champion innovation whilst also adjusting to the long-term challenges that come into the picture as a result of disruption?
Why Is the IT Delivery Gap Increasing?
IT teams have always faced the pressure to perform more operations than they can handle. With shifts happening due to disruption, the job of IT resources has become even more difficult. A lack of connected systems, capital, and experience within development teams all play a big role in this shortfall. With growing pressure to quickly adapt and meet new requirements that are increasing owing to disruption, the IT delivery gap is at risk of turning into an abyss.
Along with the higher demand for digital projects, the majority of development teams are burdened by the responsibility of executing processes, such as data onboarding and customer data integration. The complexity is greater when traditional solutions are used.
Traditional data integration methods require IT to create custom codes and extensive data mappings to complete digital onboarding. That takes weeks or months of calendar time. Further, a few weeks go into performing the customer data integration process. During that time, IT teams get pulled away from driving innovation as they fail to focus on more high-value tasks.
While it’s clear that the bottleneck around IT teams is increasing, rigid processes make it impossible for them to do anything about it. Therefore, companies need to change how they perform customer data integration and enable the wider workforce to become more involved in championing their digital innovation efforts.
Self-service and Automation Are the Future of Innovation
Self-service data integration and automation with AI and machine learning capabilities decentralize IT and allow for the emergence of citizen integrators, who can help accelerate digital innovation. These modern solutions empower non-technical business users to implement data connections more quickly than traditional data integration solutions. Business workers can perform digital onboarding 80 percent faster. They can drive their own digital initiatives through the ability to unify data, integrate systems, and deliver personalized customer experiences without needing to create any code. At the same time, IT becomes free from creating custom codes and mappings. They can use their time and effort to drive other strategic business priorities.
Additional value is created when self-service empowers business customers to self-onboard and better monitor and manage their ongoing digital interaction.
IT will have more time to prioritize the rapid delivery of digital initiatives amid the uncertainty and instability of a disruptive business economy.
Clearly, companies will need to remain ahead of the digital innovation curve more than ever. To enable this, they need to move past the misconception that only IT can build and give power to business workers. By deploying a self-service day integration solution, customer and employee experiences can become smoother, faster, and more connected.