By Ed Macosky
It’s an age-old problem confronting every organization: us and them. Sure, IT and the business are on the same side. But that doesn’t mean those teams always work well together. All too often, there’s a wedge between the departments that ultimately can hold the company back.
Aligning IT and Business Priorities
One of my colleagues, Barry Gerdsen, has a great way of describing this inherent friction. In a recent eBook about integration strategies, he noted how “the line of business is from Mars, and IT is from Venus.” The business complains that IT is “the department of no” because it can’t finish projects quickly enough. IT is equally frustrated that business co-workers don’t appreciate the relentless volume of requests they receive. It’s not a case of right or wrong. Instead, it’s the predictable finger-pointing commonplace in the fast-paced business world.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
In our new eBook, “The Integration Checklist for Cloud Migration”, we have compiled 10 essential reasons businesses should consider choosing our integration platform to solve connectivity and automation challenges. All are important. But I want to highlight one top-of-mind topic for every organization today: ease of use. The simplicity of Boomi ensures that IT and the business can pull in the same direction to work more collaboratively, efficiently, and effectively.
How Boomi Supports Integration Success
Boomi acts as a bridge for melding technical expertise and business acumen. One way the platform does this is by empowering the “citizen integrator” revolution. Non-developers in the organization – analysts, salespeople, etc. – can use Boomi to set up the integrations they need without the hands-on assistance of IT.
Democratizing Integration with Low-Code
This movement toward democratizing integration is picking up steam because it’s vital to business success. The Gartner® Integration Maturity Model states that “by 2023, at least 50% of organizations will have an integration strategy empowerment team to support self-service integration approaches.”
Here’s another data point. In a Forrester survey, 94% of respondents said low-code development addressed their needs by creating self-service models and enabled employees without IT backgrounds to deliver apps more quickly. “IT just can’t keep up with all the demands of the business,” said Senior Analyst David Mooter. “That’s why we have the trend toward low-code.”
The Citizen Integrator Takes the Stage
Business users traditionally would never consider creating integrations. The technical aspects of coding and workflows aren’t their domain. Their talents involve using the information generated by those integrations to derive insights. So, they would wait (and wait so more) for understaffed/overworked IT teams to perform the back-end work to make those integrations possible.
Boomi’s low-code solution changes the game.
Now, business users have a tool to get the data they require. Our easy-to-use platform provides guardrails with prepackaged connectors, artificial intelligence, and crowdsourcing to guide those without developer backgrounds to build integrations confidently. Let’s say you want to replicate data across two systems. Boomi has the logic and the simple visual interface functionality to quickly synchronize the information between System A and System B.
Business users move faster and get the exact information they need because they understand the subject best.
IT Enables Citizen Integrators with Boomi
Do you know who’s also excited? The IT team.
I hear from technical leaders all the time who tell a similar story. They say Boomi allows them to partner with their colleagues – often for the first time. They tell us, ‘We train business users for a couple of hours. Then we send them on their way. They’re resolving problems themselves. We’re only helping them when they have questions. We’re not worried about security concerns because of the inherent governance of the Boomi platform.”
There’s no more us and them. It’s just we.
It’s a win-win for the organization. There’s more mutual respect and a greater emphasis on accomplishing goals together. It also sets the stage for problem-solving going forward. Yes, there’s always the challenge right in front of you. But Boomi gives our customers the chance to get more creative as the business and IT brainstorm other non-traditional integration opportunities they can do together. That’s where they give the company a real competitive advantage. That shared knowledge between the two departments can be amazing.
Creating that sense of camaraderie is the real power of our platform as barriers disappear. Everyone is pulling in the same direction.
But best of all, great things happen for the organization.
Are you interested in learning more? Read the eBook, “The Integration Checklist for Cloud Migration.”