IT professionals are continually challenged to keep up with the rapid pace of technology and innovation. As business users take control of their application integration needs, corporate IT must adapt their traditional software integration approach to safely empower citizen integration.
Here are the top three challenges facing IT professionals in 2015:
Up-leveling Business Value
The current business climate requires fast-paced integration capability and workflow innovations. While there is a large quantity of integration requests surrounding business user apps, IT professionals have bigger issues on their plates to which they need to devote time and resources. The bottleneck that this creates impedes workforce productivity, and causes many business users to create application integration workarounds outside the visibility of central IT.
In order for organizations to boost business value, new procedures have to be implemented so as to maximize the amount of time IT can focus on strategic initiatives while also empowering business users with the tools they need for fast, seamless and secure integration. A key challenge will be finding and utilizing an approach that gives business users freedom, while still granting IT backend visibility to create the proper guardrails. This will ultimately reduce the amount of lower-order responsibilities on IT’s plate, increase business value and raise the overall bottom line.
The Consumerization of IT
Mobile platforms, social media and cloud technology have empowered the average person with the ability to perform tasks that used to be handled solely by IT. With each additional innovation, the gap between people’s personal and professional technology usage is being minimized, ultimately creating a seamless environment for which IT professionals must prepare.
When technological innovations are introduced into the consumer market, it is not long before they infiltrate enterprise environments as well. IT managers must continually remain abreast of new offerings and applications, ensuring their infrastructure can scale accordingly.
The multitude of applications that exist to help business users perform their jobs more efficiently present tremendous opportunities for increased business performance and productivity, but with numerous other higher order issues on their plates, IT often can’t afford to devote the time and resources necessary to performing the deluge of data connection requests in queue.
A large challenge facing IT professionals in 2015 will be finding safe ways to enable business users with the self-service integration capabilities made possible by cloud, mobile and social technologies.
Enhancing Security
There are an increasing number of applications available to business users that help them work more productively and efficiently. In order to leverage these applications, many users will create their own workarounds to quickly connect with partners and customers, and manage vast data networks.
As we move into the New Year, IT professionals will need to develop new procedures and invest in solutions that safely enable application integration for business users. In doing so, Corporate IT can rest assured that the organization’s network architecture remains secure.