Almost 70% of automation initiatives are being hindered by security concerns and data silos as organisations increasingly look to automation to improve efficiency and productivity, reports integration and API platform, MuleSoft.
However, MuleSoft’s IT and Business Alignment Barometer also revealed opportunities for companies to overcome these challenges and enable faster innovation across their organisations. IT and business teams working closely together can shrink or even eliminate organisation silos, significantly reducing time to market.
The report shows that almost nine in 10 (87%) say IT and business alignment has improved over the last 12 months leading to a number of benefits, including improved collaboration (64%), operational efficiency (58%), and better customer experience (54%).
“IT and business alignment is no longer ‘a nice to have’ – it’s essential to meeting the urgency of today’s digital imperatives,” said Brent Hayward, CEO, MuleSoft.
“Delivering innovation fast requires reusable, secure assets the business can self-serve to quickly launch new digital experiences, products and services. As IT and business teams drive automation initiatives forward, empowering more people – developers and non-developers alike – to connect data and apps in a secure way will be key to organisations’ future success.”
Based on a global study of 2,400 IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs), the MuleSoft IT and Business Alignment Barometer also highlights organisations’ business priorities and challenges over the next 12 months.
In an all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, it’s never been more important to sense and respond to changing market dynamics — and the needs of customers and employees — with speed, agility, and efficiency. Automation has become a rising focus for many organisations to drive convenience, speed, and cost reductions.
Improving operational efficiency (54%), creating better connected customer experiences (50%), improving productivity (49%), becoming more agile for change (48%), and becoming more data-driven (45%) are the top five business priorities for organisations.
Nearly 95% of organisations have implemented, or are in the process of implementing, automation initiatives, such as streamlined employee onboarding processes, to improve productivity. 93% see automation as a means to create better connected customer experiences and to improve operational efficiency.
Also, it found out that over two-thirds (67%) of organisations say their automation initiatives are IT-led (i.e., driven by the IT department and the technology that is available).
Security and governance, along with data distributed across multiple apps and platforms, continue to pose a challenge to automation initiatives, and hinder innovation.
Majority (87%) of IT and business leaders say that security and governance concerns are slowing down the pace of innovation. Almost three-quarters (73%) of organisations say the integration of disparate systems has increased their concerns around data security and governance – 31% say it had ‘significantly’ increased concerns.
Most organisations recognise the need to empower business teams to help take the operational strain off IT. However, the majority remain wary about the security implications; 87% admitted security concerns were holding them back at least to some degree from empowering non-technical users to integrate data sources.
To overcome integration challenges and become more agile, IT and business teams need to work together to co-create value and keep pace with the speed of digitalisation. IT teams can focus on producing secure and governed reusable assets, and empower business teams to integrate and self-serve these IT-approved assets to deliver innovation faster.
COVID-19 has sparked a new focus on business agility and 78% of organisations say improving business agility to remain competitive will be extremely important in the future. And 88% of business and IT leaders agree that IT has become even more important in driving business outcomes in the last 12 months.
