We noticed the term Democratise integration in The Forrester Wave: Integration Platforms As A Service, Q3 2023. Which is an article that is worth reading, by the way. The term is used to describe who, which role, should be at the centre of integration projects when aiming for a smooth process; the citizen integrator.
At Dovetail we shared this viewpoint for quite some years now; however we lacked a good term for the revolution that is needed to move from a more traditional IT centred approach to a process / line of business approach. Therefore we hope that Forrester won’t mind us elaborating on it and hopefully contribute to democratise integration.
Stages of Digital Maturity
At the core of any integration project lies the optimisation and alignment of business processes. Integrating systems and data efficiently hinges onAs the Harvard Business Review (HBR) explains in their article about Democratizing Transformation, the amount of digital solutions required in the next few years can never be accomplished by small groups of technologists and data scientists walled off in organisational silos.
Even though the HBR article refers to IT departments in general, it still provides an interesting view on the stages organisations go through in – as they call it – the Stages of Digital Maturity. In these stages IT transforms from the lowest level Traditional, siloed to the 5th level Native, democratised in 5 stages.
Application integration is characterised by being cross-departmental; one end-point is connected to another (or multiple) through a platform or application. At the very least you need 2 departments; the users of the end-points and IT. When the end-points are used by different departments, you already have a cooperation of 3 departments.
Application integration is therefore a great place to start with democratise technology within your organisation.
People, Process, Technology
At Dovetail we have always recognized that integration is not just a technical process of connecting things. The success of an integration project is built on The three pillars; People, Process and Technology. The question however is; how do they influence each other? What is the influence of democratising integration on the People part of this dynamic?
Forrester puts the designer in the centre to eliminate hand-off between IT and process designers. The process designers become citizen integrators. Once you, as an organisation, have decided that this is the way you are approaching the integration project, you choose your technology based on the fact that it is going to be made by citizen integrators. This becomes a selection criteria for the iPaaS you are considering.
In the other pillar; Process, we have gained experience by doing some integration projects ourselves. This really gives us an insight into what our implementation partners are experiencing and how we can translate this into the application improvements and our offering.
Technology is what we offer with Dovetail iPaaS. With our no code, drag & drop, easy to use interface we offer an application that is perfectly suited for the citizen integrator. Dovetail comes with a set of opinionated components, which can be used to build your own connectors ensuring maximum flexibility. All in support of our strategy Integration made Easy!
