The world is connected like never before and the amount of data streaming into digital enterprises is growing at an unprecedented rate. Analysing this data coming from a growing list of users, things and applications in real-time enables an enterprise to take actionable insights and deliver seamless customer experience. This has resulted in business users depending heavily on the turn-around time of their IT teams before they take any business actions.

Citizen integration comes to the rescue and enables a business user to integrate software applications using tools that require no traditional programming skills. These tools come with easy-to-use and drag-and-drop user interfaces to build integrations and gather actionable insights. These insights enable domain experts to visualize customer experience trends, and act immediately on providing customer delight.

IT teams across enterprises have their demand management pools or project backlogs piled up with requests from business users and operations teams. The number of people in the IT team to take up upcoming increments of delivery limits all the efforts that go into grooming and prioritizing these lists. This will lead to scenarios where analysts lose important actionable insights while they wait for the data to be integrated from different sources and aggregated into the reporting system. At times, analysts end up doing the data integration and analysis using tools that are not approved by the IT department, thereby leaving room for a data breach.

Citizen Integration brings a huge relief to domain experts, as well as IT teams, as the tools are pre-approved by IT departments. Business users with the help of these tools can create applications, which can perform quick prototyping, analysis, stakeholder demos, reporting, and pilots for potential business use cases. The increasing adoption of zero-code tools adds to the convenience of business users while realizing the use cases into end-user applications. These zero-code tools exist not only in end-user applications like CRM systems, but also in middleware integration platforms. This helps a citizen developer to not only create an application and gather insightful data, but also to collect data from mobile applications and integrate it back into the systems, providing an omni-channel experience for customers.

Have you come across business users who had a feasible business use case, but could not realize it due to time and budget constraints? Adoption of citizen integration will empower business users and help the enterprise innovate faster.