Rapid developments in cloud, social and mobile technologies have exponentially increased the pace at which business is conducted. Business users are leveraging an average of 20 – 30 SaaS based applications to handle tasks ranging from CRM, sales, customer onboarding and more. As these developments in technology hold the promise of a more efficient, productive and streamlined workflow for business users, companies are realizing that in order to survive in this digital era, they must reexamine some of their traditional workflow processes.
Citizen integrators represent a new breed of business users creating their own ad hoc integration solutions in order to keep up with the increasing pace of business. This adaptive approach allows business users to be nimble enough to cater to the demands of customers and partners without having to wait for IT to approve and facilitate their integration requests. However, this adaptive approach alone is not a long-term viable solution for organizations, as IT is left out of the loop.
For several reasons, this disconnect between business users and IT is ultimately detrimental to the success of any organization. Rogue, duct-taped solutions created by business users in a crunch remain buried within the IT infrastructure, making it difficult for IT managers to implement critical updates and fixes to the system.
The solution is a hybrid integration approach. The new pace of business necessitates an environment where business users are free to create data connections as necessary in order to reap the most benefit for the organization—in fact, companies that don’t adapt to the changing pace of business will ultimately be left behind. However, IT must remain retain oversight into the organization’s network architecture and have visibility into all data connections being made.
This ideal solution will empower the citizen integrator to safely and securely perform application integration within the parameters and guidelines set by IT.
Without a feasible method of providing both application flexibility and security, the disconnect between business users and IT will only grow more severe, to the peril of the organization at large. Will you let these circumstances affect your business, or will you look to close the gap and innovate your business practices?