Organizations today want to “get agile”. They aim to react quickly, to keep pace with ever-changing customer demands, and to acquire a competitive edge in disrupted market scenarios.
Technology is one of the many ways users depend on, recognizing it as a pertinent foundation for agility. However, for enterprises to truly maximize business outcomes, they need to empower individuals across functions instead of in IT teams. In fact, it is these “citizens” or domain experts, who are involved in defining and creating new initiatives as the frontrunners of business. And, these citizens are seeking access to data as well as systems to get the job done.
Apart from seeking and using data, citizens must connect existing data, applications and services, enabling seamless integration between legacy systems and new applications and infrastructure. This can be challenging for many companies as it will burden IT teams unnecessarily. As a remedy, domain experts need to become “citizen integrators” themselves run their own projects without depending heavily on IT teams.
When it comes to technological platforms to aid them in this pursuit, there is no shortage indeed. Modern enterprise integration solutions have played a major role in helping citizens to integrate applications and systems with least friction. It lowers the barrier for adopting and building new applications and yield rich business value, helping organizations surmount the integration challenge.
Empower Citizen Integratorswith Integration Platforms
Empowering citizen integrators is no more a hard row to hoe. With the introduction of extremely lightweight, cloud-based integration tools, domain experts can perform frictionless integration through collaboration. These integration solutions provide easy access to standard APIs so citizen integrators can interface with systems as needed, improving accessibility and interoperability.
iPaaS solutions are not only capable of supporting the application but also data and process integration projects. They empower citizen integrators establish a connection between software and create their own pipelines, without the need for outsourcing work to developers. In addition, these solutions offer a detailed visualization of all data streams – pipelines, transformations, detailed actions, and other significant elements for integration – accessible via a web browser. Further, these solutions remove complexity by doing away with manual coding part; with a set of graphical or templated elements that can be assembled, there is no need for coding.
With an intuitive user interface, iPaaS integration solutions bolster citizen integrators to easily introduce new products as well as services by avoiding long development cycles and doing away with manual, time-consuming processes.
Something worth mentioning here is that IT, still, has an important role to play in encouraging these innovations by specifying a definite set of parameters. So, even though citizen integrator has the independence of integrating applications, IT teams hold a vital role in streamlining organizational governance and other aspects such as security.