2020 was the year of reckoning for the world. Consumers were expected to make changes in the way they shopped, interacted with people, booked a doctor’s appointment, attended school, discovered new things. Organizations were also challenged by the way they tailor their experience suiting the new normal. Internally as well, data silos continue to plague many organizations and hinder their growth. The key going forward is to adopt API-led integration approaches where business users can serve themselves to integrate apps and data sources.
IT under pressure
MuleSoft’s sixth annual Connectivity Benchmark Report revealed that many companies’ IT departments are struggling to balance innovation with their daily operations. ‘Keeping the lights on’ continued to be the priority for 68% of the companies. A large pat of this is due to the requirements that necessitate remote working initiatives. However, the need for innovation has never been greater than it was in 2020 and 2021 as the world continues its struggle against the pandemic. Organizations scrambled to find right ways to address the issues. The fallout of this struggle fell on the companies’ ability to innovate as only 37% of IT teams were able to complete all the projects assigned to them compared to the 41% the previous year.
What this means is that ultimately more effort is needed to connect key systems, data and applications. And this is where the fundamental problems like as this is being done with expensive custom code integrations which cost enterprises around US $ 3,500,000 on average for the IT to manage such projects. In spite of all the investments, less than 1/3rd of the apps is integration ready in the current organizations. And with large organizations having about 800 applications, this is quite a substantial number. This is now putting even more pressure on IT functions to transform.
Legacy roadblocks
The biggest roadblocks according to the report are legacy IT infrastructure (60%) and Data Silos (90%) as companies try to adapt to the new normal and incorporate digital transformation. Legacy IT was particularly singled out as making systems overly dependent and difficult to update.
The result of this is that just 18% of respondents are confident about being to full integrate end-user experiences. The situation is even more dire for financial services, insurance and public sector organizations. Custom integrations are a big challenge associated with legacy IT. Yet, the companies that can chart a way through the challenges and digitally transform have seen marked improvement in innovation, engagement and speed of project delivery.
APIs for the future
But organizations are realizing the importance of API integrations and it is continuing to grow. It grew from 80% in 2019 to 96% in 2020. More and more organizations are using APIs to drive new integrations and development processes. And the results have been apparent. API integrations have helped increased productivity, service satisfaction and revenues.
However, one noteworthy aspect is about the usage of reusable APIs. They have stagnated around 42%. This is of importance because reuse of code, APIs and best practice templates can help relieve some of the stress faced by IT teams and encourage innovation. The good news is over 36% of organizations surveyed have a mature approach to API led integration.
Time to empower end users
IT leaders in organizations can start their own digital transformation using API led services. This can help empower business users with easy-to-use integration tools to drive up productivity, service levels and time to market. Reusable APIs should be preferred over custom point-to-point integrations to save valuable IT time and resources and speed time-to-value. At the same time, the IT team has a role in aiding smooth implementations and performance enhancements. Security should also be in focus as APIs can
With almost 9/10 organizations claiming data silos remain a challenge, there is still some way to go. But it is getting clearer that the status quo of doing things is not going to work in the post-pandemic world. For organizations to thrive in the coming years they would need to incorporate best practices. As customer expectations rise, so will the IT team’s capability to rise to the occasion to digitally transform, through API-led connectivity.