The ongoing disruption has changed the entire business landscape rapidly. Customers today expect digital experiences by default. Business leaders expect data at their fingertips. Customers expect to get their needs met immediately. How did everyone’s expectations change so quickly?
A lot of factors have a role to play here. Customers have become more specific and strict about their needs and demands, business and IT teams work together to meet new needs and demands, and the timelines of transformation are tightened, from years to months.
But there is a negative consequence of these colossal efforts. While all this work meets the immediate needs of the business, the majority of it calls for papering over and building new dependencies on already old, brittle technological solutions. IT teams find themselves in a bind. The business counterparts ask for more owing to increased customer demand and the speed of innovation happening in the market.
At the same time, the IT landscape has grown to be complex and time-consuming. Initiatives to do away with technical debt are put aside to address the emerging demands. And the problem of technical debt is layered on with quick-fix solutions. Apart from these factors, today’s economic headwinds are putting tremendous limitations on IT budgets, making it difficult to meet these emerging demands. In short, IT is expected to do more with less.
Bridging the Gap between Business and IT with Automation
Though IT teams and their business partners collaborated to deliver the value promised to customers, they had to cross over a huge gap to do so. In fact, this gap is increasing with emerging expectations as well as demands.
As a business is under a pressure from disruptors in the market to meet the growing needs and deliver digital capabilities more quickly, the IT team struggles to manage due to unavailability of time and budget. And as they reimagine their legacy systems, they must deploy their critical resources to carry out maintenance rather than implementing innovative capabilities. Obviously, both IT and business teams look forward to driving digital innovation and efficient growth but are held back due to many resource constraints.
The good news is that while many organizations have to deal with the business crisis brought on by the disruption, technological innovation continued. Specifically, there is an enormous degree of innovation in automated data integration technology that has enabled companies to do more with less.
Modern self-service-powered data integration capabilities enable companies to overcome the limitations of automation from past genres and give robust solutions that meet the needs and expectations of the digital age. One of the major challenges companies face today is a shortage of workers and technical expertise. IT teams find it difficult to deliver digital solutions at speed demanded by business partners. Self-service data integration solutions not only give power to non-technical business users, their low-code nature means they empower the business customers to become digital builders themselves.
Overall, this increases the digital delivery capacity of the companies and frees up IT to focus on more high-value tasks. Consequently, many companies are rethinking the organizational structures; restructuring the perimeters to implement teams of business specialists and IT professionals who build products.
Self-Service-Enabled Data Integration Technological Solutions That Play Nice with IT
Self-service data integration solutions enable people across the company to stay involved in implementing data connections while freeing IT to focus on other important business priorities. This dramatically minimizes the risk of expected disruptions caused by new automation and reduces technical debt.
Users can rely on pre-built application connectors, shared templates, AI, and ML to implement data connections much more quickly. Non-techie business users can rely on these solutions to onboard customers up to 80 percent faster. As a result, companies become empowered to deliver delightful customer experiences, improve their ease of doing business, and enable more resilient exception handling.
In the past, companies needed manual intervention in facing technological hiccups. That’s no longer the case. A modern data integration system facilitates better productivity and efficiency by bridging the gap between business users and IT.