Integration remains a challenge in digital transformation

Salesforce research has revealed that business application volumes within Australian organisations have increased nearly 10% in the past year, surpassing 1000 on average. However, just a third (32%) are integrated, creating data silos that lead to rising costs, duplicated work, productivity bottlenecks and disconnected experiences.

MuleSoft’s annual Connectivity Benchmark Report surveyed 100 CIOs and IT decision-makers in Australia to better understand these challenges and what organisations can do to succeed amid economic uncertainty.

Despite digital transformation advancements, 84% of respondents said integration challenges were slowing their efforts — causing infrastructure issues and major risks as IT budgets come under new scrutiny.

Organisations spent, on average, US$3.6 million on custom integration labour in the past 12 months, but 32% of respondents said integrating siloed apps and data was their biggest digital transformation challenge.

Some companies are using new technology that employs real-time data technologies to integrate, ingest and store real-time data streams at scale, with built-in connectors that bring in data from every channel (mobile, web, APIs), legacy data through, and historical data from proprietary data lakes.

“We’ve seen significant investment and dedication from businesses looking to digitally transform. Even amid uncertain economic conditions, digital transformation efforts are well underway and even speeding up in some cases,” said Matt McLarty, CTO, MuleSoft.

“However, integration efforts are lagging, and without this, businesses cannot realise the full value of their data and application capabilities. Integration tools and automation help close that gap, enabling productivity, efficiency and innovation gains that will allow businesses to achieve innovation gains that will propel businesses forward.”

As organisations in Australia become more digitally and cost centred, some are using APIs to integrate apps and data to create exceptional customer experiences and generate revenue.

According to the report, 51% have a mature strategy to empower non-technical users to easily integrate applications and data sources using APIs, demonstrating that low-code tools can improve business agility.

On average, organisations in Australia are generating 42% of revenue from APIs. Further, 77% of organisations now have a top-down API integration strategy.

IT teams that manage an organisation’s tech operations are increasingly looking to automation for efficiency and organisation-wide productivity solutions. Robotic process automation (RPA) — which enables teams to automate business processes and tasks with bots — is one automation technology seeing rapid adoption across enterprises, with 25% of organisations investing in the technology.

Key insights:

• In Australia, 98% of organisations said at least one department within their company requires both integration and automation.
• Developers (76%), IT operations (60%) and application administrators (51%) are most likely to be responsible for automating business processes.
• Data science (60%), product (62%), business analysts (63%), customer support (58%), finance (47%), marketing (66%), engineering (48%) and HR (50%) report a need for automation in their departments.
• On average, 48% of organisations’ internal software assets and components are available to developers for reuse, an opportunity for greater integration efficiency.
   

Businesses have saved up to 109 billion hours monthly using automation tools that enable employees to focus on higher-value work. By taking a unified approach to integration, API management and automation, businesses are able to drive efficiency, agility and continuous innovation.

Despite an increase in IT project volume (44% growth year over year), most (77%) organisations in Australia are ahead of schedule on digital transformation progress due, in part, to infrastructure improvement. Some IT teams (39%) were able to complete all of the IT projects asked of them last year, while 36% of projects weren’t delivered on time. The cost of failure to complete projects has risen and the average cost of failing to complete digital transformation initiatives now sits at $9.3 million annually.

Image credit: iStock.com/Traitov