Why business technologists hold the key to long-term digital success

Digital transformation supported many organizations through the pandemic. Now the world is reopening, it’s enabling first-movers to adapt once again to changing market conditions. This is about more than survival. It’s about creating exceptional customer experiences, while becoming a more nimble, agile, and resilient organization. To do so, IT and business teams must come together to break down traditional silos and equip the entire workforce with the tools they need to deliver fast and continuous digital innovation.

That means empowering business technologists -- employees from the wider business who can compose new digital products and services from reusable "building blocks". This composable enterprise model is fast taking hold across many industries, and may ultimately define the winners and losers of the post-pandemic era.

Raising the stakes

Digital transformation helps businesses improve their agility, so they can work more efficiently, and reach customers in innovative new ways, with experiences they often didn’t know they needed. This is, for example, enabling retailers to become true omnichannel players, and financial institutions to reimagine themselves as open ecosystem providers.

Research shows that the pandemic has forced many enterprises to double down on business agility. Over three-quarters (78 percent) of organizations say this is extremely important to their competitiveness. As they transform to enable this greater agility, their priorities are operational efficiency, creating better connected customer experiences, driving productivity, and becoming more data-driven. Yet these initiatives are placing almost unbearable pressure on IT teams.

As digital capabilities have become more important to driving business outcomes, the number of projects IT teams are tasked with delivering has soared by 40 percent on average last year, versus 30 percent the previous year. However, despite most firms plowing extra budget into IT, on average more than half of projects weren’t delivered on time over the past 12 months. The IT bottleneck has become a significant challenge.

A new approach to technology

In this context, it’s encouraging that organizations are beginning to change how they think about technology. Welcome to a new era of the business technologist. Four out of five technologists now actually sit outside of the traditional IT department. These individuals bring together tech skills with business know-how to propel digital initiatives without needing IT’s support. They’re using simple, intuitive, and highly automated tools to integrate systems, unify data and deliver personalized customer experiences -- all without having to write a single line of code.

Closer IT and business alignment has already enabled improved collaboration, operational efficiency, and customer experiences in many organizations. IT departments that support business technologists in this way are 2.6 times more likely to accelerate digital transformation and become genuine industry disruptors. There’s a large pool of talent waiting to be empowered in this way.

These business technologists could be doing anything from automating manual tasks, to integrating customer journeys across channels. Other popular initiatives include leveraging AI to drive customer insight and personalization, or using predictive analytics to minimize downtime. With the right tools and talent, the use cases are near limitless.

How to get there

So how do organizations unlock all of this latent talent and release the power of their business technologists? One of the most effective solutions is to take an API-led approach, to expose data and digital capabilities in a consumable and reusable manner. This is the first step towards creating a composable enterprise, where business technologists are able to build new digital projects using existing components. It’s fast, effective, and should help companies to adapt quickly to meet rapidly evolving customer demand.  

Highly automated low/no code tools are also key to this approach, enabling non-IT users to simply drag-and-drop building block components into place to create new capabilities. This takes the pressure off skilled developer teams already swamped with work and struggling to "keep the lights on". Some 86 percent of organizations agree that if business users could securely create their own connected experiences using low or no code, it would improve business outcomes.

Let’s be clear, there’s still a need for IT involvement, primarily to mitigate security and governance concerns. These are regularly cited as the number one challenge when creating integrated user experiences. There will also need to be something of a cultural shift in many organizations where composability is not yet widely understood or adopted. However, when reusable APIs are harnessed effectively by business technologists, the results could be spectacular. This won’t happen overnight, but when the destination is this exciting, it makes sense to start the journey as soon as possible.

Photo Credit: Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock

Ian Fairclough is Vice President, Head of Customer Success (EMEA), MuleSoft