In a MuleSoft survey of 651 IT decision-makers from enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, respondents said integration was a major barrier to digital transformation.
And organizations have a lot to integrate; on average, companies with more than 1,000 employees use more than 1,000 individual applications in all of their businesses.
Integration between systems, the pitfall of digital transformation
A common way for businesses to connect applications to each other is to custom code their applications and APIs, often referred to as point-to-point integration.
However, for a company with more than 1,000 applications, this level of tight coupling can create problems when changes, evolutions, or updates occur.
IT decision-makers say that on average, only 29 percent of their business applications are currently integrated or connected.
The challenge of integrating systems and applications
The previous figures highlight two things.
There is still a huge potential for integration in organizations and therefore a great opportunity to increase the efficiency of their business and innovate by integrating and connecting more applications.
However, more than 80% of IT decision-makers believe that traditional integration should disappear within the next 5 years in order to achieve the secondary objectives of improving IT systems’ efficiency, namely:
- Reduce operating costs
- Meet business needs faster
- Stay competitive
- Extract more value from our data
- Innovate faster
Even more, IT decision-makers point out that 63% of their time is spent running the business. Thus, they only have a third of their time for innovation and the development of new projects.
To conclude on this point, it is clear from the above figures that companies and IT departments need to find a new, much more efficient model for their IT operations.
Accelerate your digital transformation with an API Strategy
If organizations want to do digital transformation and innovate faster, it will be critical to be able to discover, connect, and reuse their software assets through APIs because tomorrow is not the day we will replace IT back-office systems.
In this way, businesses will be able to move to an IT self-service model in which anyone in the organization can access a market for APIs and integration resources that would enable them to connect applications and data more quickly. This would ultimately eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming tailor-made integration projects.
Research has shown that the vast majority (93%) of IT decision-makers believe that IT self-service will be critical to the success of their digital transformation. It seems that the days when the IT department is holding tight reins on all of the company’s IT are about to end.
An API strategy is essential to the prosperity of today’s digital economy. By developing the capabilities of the business through becoming a digital platform, organizations can significantly increase their profits. APIs also unlock the value of internal data, making it easier to consume data and applications in a simple, standardized way.
In this regard, note the following results for companies that have undertaken to value their APIs:
- 58% – increased productivity
- 48% – increased innovation
- 43% – increased collaboration between employees
- 35% – greater agility of IT self-service between teams
- 35% – reduced response time to business line requests
- 34% – reduced operating costs
Finally, 25% of IT decision-makers surveyed said that 25 to 50% of their company’s revenue came from the valorization of their APIs.
These are other indicators that more and more organizations are beginning to realize the benefits of an API strategy and the financial benefits they can derive from it.
Beyond APIs, the imperative of IT operations’ renewal
In summary, Digital Transformation is based on two major axes; improving the efficiency of IT systems and improving the quality of the Customer experience. The first being a sine qua non condition to the second.
Thus, the execution of the initiatives necessary for the success of a true Digital Transformation involves a wide range of systems, applications, processes and resources, both human and financial.
And, there is not one magical solution to improve the efficiency of your IT department but rather a set of tactics.
Here are the main solutions considered by IT decision-makers in order to make a real change of culture in your IT department and engage it on the path of renewal.
- Hiring more talent 3%
- Deploying DevOps * 8%
- Reusing software to create new products & services 5%
- Outsourcing to External Developers 8%
- Valorization of APIs 9%
- Implementation of a Micro-Services Architecture ** 7%
* The breakout of IT Development and IT Operations silos appears more than ever as imperative to the success of an IT operations renewal.
** Reference is made here to Service-Oriented Development and the philosophy of On-Demand Service Development, which is broken down into reusable generic services and local (domain-driven) services.
Conclusion
Valorization of all software assets and most of all among these, APIs, as well implementing a new IT operations business model should be pillars of your Digital Transformation Strategy.