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May 2, 2023
Early in 2023, Digibee conducted our second annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, reaching out to one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
In this blog post series, we examine, one-by-one, the top findings in the report, as identified by the input of your peers.
The Challenge: IT Backlogs
At its core, an IT backlog is symptomatic of other problems plaguing IT organizations and the tools at their disposal. The only long-term hope for actually reducing an ever-growing IT backlog is to address the root causes, such as:
Inadequate resources – Whether this means not enough tech personnel to keep up with demand, or a shortage of adequate tools and technologies, even if you have the best IT management in the world, mismatched resources easily cause bottlenecks that contribute to an IT backlog.
Communication challenges – Communication can obviously be challenging for any organization of any size. Add in the rate of change all IT organizations are managing these days, and the growing scale, complexity and interdependence of various systems, and it’s easy to see how communication challenges — even with the best of intentions — contribute to backlogs.
Complex, manual or non-standard processes – Similar to communication challenges, an overly complex or needlessly manual process slows the team down by adding unnecessary steps. A good example is the need to manually enter information to multiple IT solutions versus automatically pulling it from the source. Non-standard processes hinder the ability to learn from past experiences, impeding efficiencies and adding to the backlog when issues remain unresolved. As infrastructures become more and more federated and less centrally managed, these issues pile up.
Legacy Systems – A significant number of hours are burned by teams just trying to address the IT challenges presented in keeping legacy systems up and running. As these systems chug along in production, the technology gap with more modern tools widens. The result? Ever-increasing IT backlog projects as time and effort — and coding — are all needed to address security and other legacy system deficiencies.
With the legacy approach, every interface must be coded and debugged, security audits must be performed, the integration must be tested before going live and the code must be modified and retested to support any change in the applications of the data they require.
– Forbes, September 2022
In Digibee’s 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report we discovered that many of the challenges associated with integration also align with IT backlogs, reinforcing the value of a strong integration strategy to deliver efficiencies across the enterprise. So, rather than helping to address and reduce IT backlogs, integration approaches appear in many cases to add to the issues — or at least suffer from the same problems.
The High Price We Pay
Once an IT backlog begins to grow, it becomes increasingly hard to course-correct through IT management alone. Each item becomes another ‘to-do’ on an ever-growing list that must compete against new requests carried out by the same resource pool. Simultaneously, the root cause remains very much in play until it is resolved.
Inadequate resources is a chronic pain-point. Survey respondents report well over half their IT backlog projects require integration support, putting a particular squeeze on IT integration developers.
Overcoming with iPaaS
If so many respondents experience the same IT challenges that lead to an IT backlog during an integration implementation, how will integration solve the problem?
While poor integrations can take a toll on the organization, a modern integration strategy easily connects the systems, processes, and data that underpin the enterprise — lightening the load for IT and quickly whittling down sprawling IT backlogs.
While the pace of integration increases, so does the gap between those companies advancing with integration and those that are not. Hindered by in-house, on-premises, and legacy systems, these organizations face increasing challenges including system downtime, expanding IT backlogs, and inadequate resourcing. Struggling to remain operational, innovation is often deprioritized to the detriment of the business.
– Digibee’s 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report, Page 11
iPaaS as your IT Integration Partner
Digibee’s iPaaS technology resolves the risk of traditional IT system integration. Our customers are able to shrink integration timelines drastically. For example, our work with Payless resulted in the integration of the retailer’s secure e-commerce platform across more than 200 stores in less than 30 days.
Digibee customers leverage built-in features and expertise. With security measures and legacy systems being tied as the top challenges our respondents experienced when integrating, having an iPaaS can provide meaningful support in both those areas.
While some iPaaS options on the market require lengthy certificate courses for a developer to learn to use their system (which re-introduces the concern of a resourcing bottleneck), Digibee takes the opposite approach with a powerful low-code interface to ensure that developers of all levels can be brought in with minimal training, thereby expanding the pool of integration resources available internally.
People, especially those who want to drive immediate change, are driving their own big ideas. Unwilling to consign the success of a critical project to an ever-growing IT backlog, technical professionals who live outside the integration developer realm are taking advantage of modern technology. With a visually-driven iPaaS environment and drag-and-drop interfaces, building and integrating applications has never been easier.
– Digibee’s 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report, Page 17
With so many IT challenges to overcome, it’s no surprise that over 70% of leaders surveyed are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology in 2023.
Get the full story on what’s changed and how your peers are mobilizing enterprise integration in 2023. Download your free Digibee 2023 State of Enterprise Integration report today for all of the survey results and the analysis.
