The need for IT innovation takes on new urgency in the post-pandemic world, according to MuleSoft’s 2021 Connectivity Benchmark report.
Business demands on IT increased as remote work replaced office norms, and the majority of IT teams failed to deliver on all project commitments.
Organizations continue to spend a great deal of IT time and money on custom integrations.
But, those who can transform see increased customer engagement and innovation, and improved project-delivery speed.
Organizations are embracing APIs for new integration projects: The vast majority of organizations are using APIs, and many are generating significant revenue from them.
IT must meet growing integration demands of business teams: More organizations are deploying self-service tools to empower their business teams to integrate apps and data sources.
Some 36% of organizations have a mature approach to API-led integration for non-technical business users and 44% are developing a strategy.
Organizations are under greater pressure to digitize services quickly at scale to meet rising customer demands, scale innovation, and create new revenue channels.
Here’s a deeper look into the first two parts of the executive summary — the growing demand for IT innovation and the importance of integration of scale innovation and business digital transformation.
The report identifies key trends that speak to working from anywhere, pressure to innovate, and expanded volume of projects.
Even though organizations asked IT to do much more than “keep the lights on,” the average IT team spent 68% of their time running day-to-day business activities.
This remains virtually unchanged from the previous year (69%) and indicates the need to increase IT bandwidth for growth and innovation-led projects.
The increased demand for IT and the failure of many organizations to adequately optimize day-to-day business activities caused IT teams to slip in the percentage of projects they were about to complete.
Organizations are increasing IT budgets, but not in line with the growing demands from the business.
Integration challenges continue to be a major roadblock for digital transformation initiatives.
However, this doesn’t come cheap — the average enterprise spends $3.5 million per year on integration-related IT labor costs.
More organizations (69%) are taking a top-down approach to developing an integration and API strategy than last year.
Some 77% of respondents say failure to complete digital transformation projects will impact their revenue over the coming year, up from 74% in 2020.
Unfortunately, integration issues continue to slow down digital transformation initiatives for the vast majority (87%) of organizations.
In today’s digital-centric world, organizations must connect their systems, applications, and data.
Is Your Company Ready to create new innovation?