Integration and automation are essential for achieving digital transformation. Companies that can successfully leverage these as part of their digital transformation strategy have the potential to gain a major edge over their competition.
A codeless integration and automation tool, or iPaaS, is an invaluable asset in this effort, offering numerous benefits for businesses and organizations across most industries. Let’s take a look at the top three major benefits of investing in a codeless iPaaS tool.
Eliminate Your Integration Backlog
The primary benefit of investing in iPaaS relates to democratization or technology. With a codeless iPaaS platform, you can empower technically inclined employees throughout your organization to build out integrations and automated workflows quickly without writing code or having to rely on IT.
This allows you to take advantage of key functionality while reducing the burden on IT teams, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks instead of manual inputs or troubleshooting legacy systems. Similarly, it eliminates the backlogs often associated with integration projects, so they remain on schedule while protecting against data loss or security risks.
TeamDynamix’s iPaaS platform centralizes all integrations into one hub with a library of connectors to common systems such as Workday, Oracle, your IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, Salesforce, the Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs.
With all systems connected and data points now secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data and build out automation and workflows using a visual flow builder (that’s drag-and-drop) that can be triggered from a field change, form fill or any number of actions.
With TeamDynamix – you get the added ability to combine your TeamDynamix ITSM tool with iPaaS and Project Portfolio Management (PPM), all on a single platform – giving even more visibility into all of the work and projects being done throughout your entire organization.
Another benefit of using iPaaS is that you don’t need to worry about homegrown scripts or automations – while these might seem like a quick fix to solve the issue of automating repetitive tasks, they often bring a number of security risks and can be difficult to maintain as an organization continues to grow.
In addition, building and maintaining these homegrown integrations and automations can take up even more time – adding to backlogs that can cause project delays and result in unhappy customers.
Reduce IT Resource Drain and Retain IT Talent
For IT service desk technicians, a codeless iPaaS tool can also help reduce toil by allowing them to automate time-consuming administrative tasks such as password resets or system updates. As a result, these professionals are freed up to work on more interesting projects that require greater intellectual engagement rather than repeating mundane processes over and over again.
These types of repetitive tasks often take up time and negatively impact the morale of IT teams – especially those working the IT service desk. A recent study from InformationWeek found that:
- 58% of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours per week (six-and-a-half work weeks annually) fulfilling repetitive requests from the business.
- 90% of respondents say that manual and repetitive IT tasks contribute to low morale and attrition in their organizations.
When asked to rank the types of tasks respondents found to be time-wasting and to contribute the most to poor morale they listed password resets, IT ticket cleanup, onboarding/offboarding employees, managing credentials and software provisioning – all tasks that can be automated through iPaaS.
And with the difficulty many organizations are having hiring IT talent, it’s more important than ever to make sure your IT teams are engaged and content with their work.
At Pima County, Mark Hayes, information technology leader for the county, said reducing toil and improving IT morale was a driving factor for investing in iPaaS. Hayes and his team recently implemented TeamDynamix iPaaS and IT Service Management and have had positive results so far.
“People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” he said.
Festival Foods, a grocery store chain that operates about 40 grocery stores and supports 9,000 employees with an IT staff of 40, including a seven-member service desk, also uses TeamDynamix for both ITSM and PPM, as well as iPaaS.
“Before, we had no project governance process,” Alex Turek, IT service desk manager, explained. “It was very ad-hoc. Whoever could scream the loudest got the most IT resources. Finding a tool that also included PPM was huge.”
Managing projects and IT services within the same platform has brought significant benefits, leading to improved efficiency and accountability.
“Technicians can see their project work and their IT work in one space,” Turek said. “This means it’s easier to communicate and ensure follow-through. Project managers can assign tasks to my service desk team within the same dashboard they’re using to resolve tickets. Those pop right up, helping them be aware of all their tasks and priorities so they can easily meet their deadlines.”
The next step for Turek and his team is to leverage the integrated Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) capabilities within TeamDynamix to automate their most repetitive processes.
“We’re looking to automate tasks such as password resets, user account deactivation, user onboarding and other tasks we do often, so we can reduce the daily workload on our team,” Turek said.
Improve Efficiencies, Create a Better User Experience
Finally, codeless iPaaS tools have the potential to enhance the efficiencies of your team – whether it’s filling in gaps due to resource constraints or streamlining existing processes so you can accomplish more with fewer resources – resulting in reduced costs and improved customer experiences.
By using iPaaS to automate repetitive tasks, employees have more time available for value-added activities that truly drive growth while still gaining accurate results each and every time. And because your IT service desk technicians aren’t having to spend 5-10 hours of their week resetting passwords – they can focus on providing better service to customers and other end-users.
Investing in an iPaaS is an invaluable way for businesses to gain competitive advantages through integration and automation while greatly improving user experiences across the board at lower costs. With its ability to democratize integration building, reduce IT backlogs and eliminate mundane manual tasks for IT service desk technicians, there’s no doubt that it’s one of the best investments you can make for your business today.
To learn more about trends in ITSM and iPaaS check out the latest market study from InformationWeek: State of IT – Resource Drain.