Learn About Citizen Integration
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you will be able to:
- Understand the challenges that organizations face reconciling many systems into a single source of truth that powers real-time experiences.
- Explain why line-of-business managers should be empowered to make technology decisions that move their part of the business forward.
- Describe how citizen integration is an opportunity to distribute the project workload that’s typically the responsibility of the IT department.
According to a survey of over 800 global IT leaders, the average enterprise has its data scattered across as many as 900 different systems, some of which don’t even belong to the organization. For example, customer data can easily be fractured across Salesforce for customer relationship management, with various systems for physical point of sales, online orders, financials and inventory management, electronic execution of contracts, customer service, and so on.
According to the same research, the average customer interaction involves 35 different cloud and on-premises systems and applications. Yet on average only a third of those systems are integrated in an attempt to create a unified view of the business. One that often includes the sort of real-time, 360-degree view of the customer that’s necessary to offer a connected-but-frictionless omni-channel experience across web, mobile, call-center, and retail channels.
Despite identifying data silos as their biggest challenge, the integration shortfall is so significant that 59 percent of those IT leaders say the demands from the business are outstripping their IT departments’ capacities to service them. Even worse, those IT departments aren’t getting the necessary budget improvements to close the delivery gap. Ninety percent of them anticipate that, without relief of some sort, revenue will suffer.
In another survey of over 1700 line-of-business (LoB) managers conducted by MuleSoft Research, over 68 percent of those surveyed said they were involved in identifying new technical approaches to a range of business challenges, from improving business efficiency by connecting different back-end systems to launching bespoke mobile applications. Further echoing the degree to which the business is getting involved in integration activities, the IT research firm Gartner found that “business users are increasingly performing self-service tasks to integrate data and applications.” But of those surveyed by MuleSoft, over half said they were frustrated with the speed at which IT is able to deliver on digital projects.
Rising expectations on IT from highly engaged business managers? Static resources? A ticking clock? This seemingly intractable situation is not as dire as it seems.
The history of technology is littered with tipping points at which ordinary citizens start doing extraordinary things that were once strictly the domain of technical personnel. Here are some examples.
- Completing a phone call once required the assistance of one or more switch operators who had to manually assemble a temporary physical circuit between the call’s participants (and then tear that circuit apart when the call was finished).
- Just printing a document for distribution required an unimaginable string of events (that, at best, ended with the operator of a mimeograph machine). Eventually, documents were sent to pools of word processing specialists. Today, a 3 year old can author and print an electronic document in full color as though it were the child’s play that it is!
- Reports and queries were ordered by filling out a form on colored paper and sending that form along with a reel of magnetic tape (on which the source data was stored) to the IT department. The IT department mounted the tape onto a mainframe computer and ran the COBOL computer program that corresponded to the color of the form that was received with the tape. The process sometimes took forever, often depending on how busy the mainframe operators were with other requests. Today, a similar process can take less than a minute using spreadsheet software or cloud-based solutions like Salesforce.
- Publishing text to the web required a team of technical people. Today, anyone can publish text, audio, and video in an instant.
- Speaking of video, it wasn’t too long ago that you needed an entire video crew to script, record, edit, and publish a video. Websites and applications like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have collapsed the entire workflow into a near–real-time process involving just one person with a smartphone.
- A password change or reset required a call to an IT or support person. In most cases, you had to verbalize the new password to them so they could enter it for you.
In each of these cases, it was just a matter of enabling users with the right tools to service themselves.
Given the seemingly intractable delivery gap between the need to integrate certain systems and automate certain processes across those integrations and the limited capacity of the IT department to accommodate the rising tide of requests from the business, the solution seems pretty obvious. Why not enable those LoB managers with the capability to build their own integrations and automations? In other words, arm them with tools that turn them into citizen integrators.
After all, according to the study from MuleSoft Research, with the right tooling (tools that offer a clicks-not-code approach to integration), “organizations should be able to empower a broader range of LoB users who previously lacked the technical means with which to create customer value and new revenue opportunities, faster.”
LoB’s Emergent Need for Speed
Given most organizations’ thirst for business agility—the need to respond to constantly shifting business conditions in a heartbeat—it isn’t hard to see how they got to this situation. For example, a pandemic hits and suddenly, instead of booking retail sales at your stores’ cash registers, your inventory is hanging on racks on the sidewalk where the floor team is outdoors, processing orders using newly acquired tablets, each equipped with $10 dongles for swiping credit cards.
There is little time to lean back for some holistic thinking. Under intense pressure, your director of retail sales meets with her managers and decides to move the clothing racks outside. But she realizes the existing point-of-sales (POS) system is tethered to desks inside the stores. She drops her credit card on devices and apps that allow the floor team—now the sidewalk team—to complete customers’ credit card transactions right where the product is. And within a short period of time, revenues are recovering. Meanwhile, sidewalk sales information and customer data are now accumulating in systems that are siloed from the indoor point-of-sales and back-office systems.
Welcome to the new normal where organizations don’t have the luxury of time to jump on game-changing innovations or respond to market forces that are often out of their control. Here are some scenarios where agility can make or break business outcomes.
- An existing competitor announces it’s partnering with a delivery service to extend the reach of its retail operations into geographies where your organization has enjoyed an uncontested physical presence.
- A clever group of recent college graduates announces the launch of a startup aimed at disrupting your industry’s status quo with an innovative idea that, up until this point, escaped the imaginations of the incumbents.
- A government organization with full or partial jurisdiction over how your organization conducts its business implements a new regulation.
- A natural disaster strikes in a geography where your organization conducts significant physical operations. This could be where the headquarters are or where there are important points of presence (retail stores, warehouses, transportation hubs, medical offices, and so on).
- Areas where your organization operates are stricken by a regional epidemic or a global pandemic requiring a rapid shift to digital channels as in-person interactions for both employees and customers are greatly reduced.
Staying Agile While Taming Application Sprawl
Regardless of whether data is sprawled across 900 systems or nine, the approach you take to taming it into a 360-degree view of the business and its customers will determine the extent to which your company can respond to shifting market conditions, accelerate its business processes (via automation), and deliver amazing connected customer experiences (CX).
The key to taming that sprawl and developing that consolidated view is not necessarily to consolidate to fewer systems of record as one might think. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s critically important for line-of-business managers to, within reason, have the authority to do what’s best for their businesses (like dropping their credit cards on innovative solutions that change the game or meet the moment).
The objective is to embrace new solutions and their individual capabilities as digital parts that become a part of the organization’s application network, contributing to the bigger picture. These solutions don't just service to the initial business need. Via interlocking connections called application programming interfaces (APIs), these components can be reused as integral parts of other business processes both old and new. Organizations that can innovatively mix and match API-driven solutions are able to derive real-time 360-degree views of their customers, create highly engaging end-to-end customer experiences, and offer greatly improved business outcomes.
Before our director of sales used her credit card to acquire a bunch of portable magnetic stripe readers, she made sure that the accompanying point-of-sales software was an open platform that, through APIs, was also a candidate for inclusion in the organization’s so-called digital foundry—its application network. In particular, she wanted to make sure it could be integrated with the company’s main system of record when it came to customer information: Salesforce Sales Cloud. She knew to do this because her company had recently announced how it would be transitioning into an API-driven composable enterprise and that it needed everyone across the business to embrace the idea by becoming integration champions.
She also knew that adding new API-driven solutions into the organization’s application network was only half the battle. While she played a critical role in the identification and acquisition of a technological solution to an urgent business challenge—one that through its native APIs, could become an integral part of the organization’s existing sales and customer workflows—she also knew that she couldn’t expect the heavily backlogged IT department to take full responsibility for performing the integration itself.
For that, she would have to go beyond just being a champion for integration. She’d have to join the ranks of the company’s citizen integrators—those line of business managers, Salesforce admins, and others who, with the help of citizen integration tools, can build the integrations themselves.
So, how exactly does citizen integration work? In the next unit, you meet Ashley Wiggins, a recently promoted manager of sales operations at Northern Trail Outfitters, and you get to see firsthand how she optimized the company’s inventory reservation process by integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud with NetSuite using MuleSoft Composer.
