The simple answer is... we all are!
Traditionally data integration has been an exclusive task of IT specialists to connect applications and integrate data between systems. And as part of this exercise the tools used to build integration solutions are complex ESB or EAI applications that require programming background and requires steep learning curve and are costly to maintain.
We are now entering a new era of data integration where business users, or in other words, Citizen Integrators can accomplish these same tasks with ease by using tools such as Adeptia. Businesses are moving away from acquiring costly IT resources and instead are utilizing existing business users within their company to automate processes such as customer on-boarding, order fulfillment, order to cash, data synchronization with SaaS applications etc.
Characteristics of a Citizen Integrator can be broadly defined as:
- Person who understands the business
- Understands the client needs
- Understands the subject matter related to a business process
- Understands the data requirements
- Person who is technically savvy
- Well versed in using applications related to analytics, reporting tools etc
- Well versed in using SaaS applications related to CRM, Accounting etc.
- Eager to learn new technologies to address day to day business issues
Business users are much closer to data regardless of what their task is in the organization whether it is on-boarding new customers or business analytics. They are the ‘first responders’ in a changing business environment and have to rapidly adapt and come up with solutions to address those challenges. Solutions that need to be implemented cannot wait for a slow IT response. And thus the task of a citizen integrator is to play that important role in implementing solutions through products such as Adeptia.
Trends that Will Drive Citizen Integration
A Gartner report observes that citizen developers will build nearly 25% of business applications in an enterprise. This advantage will free up engineering resources to focus on deeper infrastructure concerns. Organizations without citizen integration capabilities will face dilemmas in responding to changing market forces and customer preferences.
Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud (SMAC) technologies are redefining the relationship between IT and business. And high level data availability is needed to harness more value from these technologies. It is strategically unwise to wait for the IT teams to build integrations as they will take several months of time to create workflows. The IT cycle runs and marathons can be avoided if business users can build these integration workflows and bring data from any target to the source system in real time.
Next generation citizen-developer workflows will help business users to address integration project needs that IT can’t afford to focus on. Here are some other factors that will drive the trend:
Greater Personalization: Personalization is the key to improve products from the user experience perspective and create top of the mind brand recall. End users can customize and personalize customer facing tools as per their tastes and preferences. Mashup tools will allow greater reuse of mobile driven interface and online products.
Flexible Infrastructure Ownership: Business users can deliver scalable computing infrastructure as a service over the Internet. This will liberate application development from infrastructure ownership, and accelerate service delivery & time to revenue.
Next-Generation Developer Tools: For employees, technology consumerization will become a way of life rather than a trend. Emerging tools will help business users to create, maintain, and constantly support other programs. This will allow IT teams to solve more complex problems.
Foundational IT Support: Enterprises can get overarching business benefits from a run-time integration engine like minimization of manual tasks, high availability of data, accuracy of data, rapid deployment of services, agile data transformation, etc.
Adeptia Connect Features to Empower Citizen Integrator
Adeptia has been a leading player in the space of service oriented architecture (SOA) integration for many years. Adeptia Connect is an enterprise integration platform specifically targeted for the citizen integrators. It offers out-of-the-box self service capabilities to business users for complex and distributed IT environment. It simplifies integrations between cloud and onpremise applications in a hybrid IT network without the need of writing codes and deploying separate infrastructure. Prebuilt connectors and shared templates allow business users to build integrations in minutes and not months, thereby saving cost and improving time to revenue.
To learn more about Citizen Integration please refer to Lou Ennuso's post, "The Era of Citizen Integration."
