Modern integration and automation platforms help address the problems of growing integration debt by making it quick and easy to connect any systems you bring on board with the rest of the organization. This means that IT teams can satisfy the demand without the need for coding, development, scriptwriting and building out point-to-point integrations.
iPaaS is built for the kind of quick deployment teams need to avoid creating and accumulating new integration debt because it’s so easy to make new connections leveraging a library of pre-built connectors. Once connected, automation can easily be created using a codeless drag-and-drop interface.
Smaller teams can connect new applications without needing a long development cycle and a team of developers.
As mentioned before, standard systems that can be integrated using iPaaS include your CRM, ERP and more – for instance, many organizations have an ecosystem of applications that sit around core platforms such as Workday, MUNIS, Banner or Salesforce. With iPaaS, the ecosystem can easily be connected to help synchronize data and create workflows to prevent manual processing and redundant data entry.
In addition to making it easier to connect systems, iPaaS helps reduce toil within your IT organization. A recent study from InformationWeek found:
- 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.
- 45% of IT teams spend more than five hours per week writing scripts for workflow and automation.
For many organizations, those working the helpdesk still process those tickets and others like it manually – meaning they are spending hours each day answering the same questions and cleaning up the same tickets when there are tools available that can automate these processes and free up these employees to work on higher priority projects.
For organizations that don’t promote self-service with a well-designed user portal – those IT departments likely spend even more time on these types of tasks.
As the study shows, across industries highly skilled IT workers spend much of their time on repetitive, mundane tasks to either service their customers, or to tie together the growing ecosystem of apps and cloud services procured by their organization to support the business.
The data shows that 58 percent of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours per week on repetitive requests from business stakeholders, and more than one in five say they are averaging 10 or more hours per week on these tasks.
These requests include things like onboarding new employees, name changes, department changes and provisioning software.
And while these tasks are prime candidates for automation – the reality is that 40 percent of those surveyed report that 25 percent or more of these tasks must be done manually for one reason or another.
A quick calculation shows that an IT worker (or team) who spends 10 hours a week on these manual tasks wastes more than one financial quarter every year on things like resetting passwords for people.
Not only is this draining corporate resources, but it can be draining on the morale of IT employees who often join a company seeking to innovate and problem solve – not get bogged down with technical grunt work.
In fact, the survey found that 90 percent of respondents felt these types of repetitive manual IT tasks directly contributed to low morale and attrition within their IT organizations.
When asked to rank these types of tasks, the study found the top 5 time-wasting tasks are:
- Password resets.
- IT ticket clean up.
- Onboarding/offboarding employees.
- Managing credentials.
- Software provisioning.
With iPaaS you can automate these tasks and eliminate redundancy and toil for your workers. Not only does this improve efficiencies, but it improves employee morale.
