Self-Service Data Integration Solution Drives IT Productivity

Whitepaper: Self-Service Integration

Empower business users and turn them into citizen integrators to fortify business outcomes.

White Paper

Self-Service Data Integration Solution Drives IT Productivity

Self-Service Data Integration Solution Drives IT Productivity

The enterprise technology landscape is taking new forms and one of its unintended consequence is IT complexity. When technologies remain in a constant flux, their usability is often left behind.

IT complexity has been increasing constantly since the past 15 to 20 years, reaching a point where it’s impossible to manage. In the recent past, enterprises averaged 3 to 4 enterprise systems which needed to be connected with 5 to 10 external partners for data exchange. Few integrations were needed as number of key applications and major partners were limited. The IT staff used developer tools to create point to point interfaces and they took months to create each one. To add, it quickly becomes unmanageable, brittle, and damaging to both the IT budget and the organization’s ability to meet current and changing business demands. However, in the present scenario, technological innovations such as self-service integration platforms are not just changing how IT works, but also driving a shift in the way business operates. Also, there are Cloud-based applications like Workday, Salesforce, BOX, etc., that are changing business operations in ways we have never seen before.

That’s why it is not uncommon to see 20 or more strategic applications in each company extended to hundreds or thousands of B2B customers and partners, most requiring integration. A lot of integrations are needed between applications and external partners. Enterprise IT remains in a state of volatility as new partners or applications are frequently added or removed. The traditional approach of experienced IT resources coding in last-generation developer tools using developer tools is no longer feasible leading to a need for a simpler, self-service approach that is easy enough for resources outside of IT to use.

As enterprises deploy more technologies to support their business, they automatically create “islands of automation,” adding an extra layer of complexity. These systems don’t scale as per business needs and prevent organizations from driving revenue growth and productivity. It is risky to remove previously deployed legacy systems as many of them are still required to meet business functions. This dated approach is difficult to maintain and scale and since this process results in higher costs than necessary requiring IT developers to build integrations with a point-to-point (P2P) connectivity approach.

They use point-to-point coding and other costly home-grown solutions to establish connectivity between applications, services, and processes. This dated approach does not scale and as a result, a lot of time and money is spent on IT developers building integrations with a point-to-point (P2P) connectivity approach.

All this can be simplified if IT integration is done using self-service integration platforms since it becomes manageable by resources outside of IT. Business operations teams can build integrations faster without relying on IT, consolidate and centralize multiple sources of the truth, and gain more agility internally while externally becoming easier to do business with. Through better process orchestration, business teams can leverage both new & old technologies and compose them into new service solutions and that too with minimal IT intervention.