Bridging the gap between IT and the business

IT and business alignment is crucial for organizations to be successful in meeting their digital business goals. The business needs to respect IT as the high-functioning business partner that it is, instead of viewing it as a cost center.

Likewise, to keep the business happy, IT must work on projects that align with business goals and deliver results within expected timeframes. But often, these teams are speaking different languages and have different sets of values. In this blog, discover each team’s pain points, and how to get everyone on the same page so you can better execute your strategy.

IT suffers from painful integration of customized workflows.

In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal reported that customization is a new “four-letter word” for CIOs and other corporate IT managers.

Elevated demand for highly customized applications from line-of-business leaders and users continues to place increased strain on IT teams, who are already focused on maintenance and security of existing systems. Customizations take a lot of time, code, and additional maintenance, lengthening backlogs and stretching resources thin.

As companies shift more workloads to the cloud, integrating highly customized solutions into new systems can quickly become a nightmare as well, because so much can break. Even after the migration is complete, teams have to watch out for glitches with software updates.

When the business requests a customization, they might be used to hearing, “no,” because the investment would cause so many problems on the back end, eroding trust between departments due to lack of understanding.

Users suffer from business app fatigue.

Despite the challenges of integrating customized solutions, the needs of the business can’t be ignored.End users are tired. The average business professional uses 9.4 apps at work, according to the survey of 881 business professionals worldwide conducted on behalf of Harmon.ie, an Israeli software company with U.S. headquarters in Boston.

In addition to causing “app fatigue”, where users become overwhelmed by too many applications, this proliferation of business apps can result in major productivity losses and data quality issues.

As users jump from app to app to complete basic tasks or search for information, time gets wasted and risk for error goes up.

Meanwhile, even organizations where only a few apps are used can still have significant struggles with user adoption, productivity, and data quality if the application is not designed to meet their needs.

Back in the 1990s, some groundbreaking IBM research showed that better software design could reduce the time to complete tasks by 9.6 minutes per task. This translated into internal savings of $6.8 million within the first year.

Bridging the gap.

To avoid issues with workflow integration while meeting the business halfway, Gartner suggests a compromise, that companies should minimize customizations for back-end applications by applying a “best-fit” approach. Since many cloud vendors offer guardrails for minor customization, the business could get at least part of what they truly need.

The problem with a “best fit” approach is that apps that don’t fit correctly don’t fit at all. They’re still not designed for the humans who work for your company, because even the most robust cloud vendors cannot plan for every capability your app might need, based on the unique way your people do business.

Line-of-business leaders and users need highly personalized apps. CIOs and IT managers need the flexibility to be able to provide those solutions, without ramping up time, cost, and frustration.

How do we bridge the gap? For IT teams and business users around the world, no-code platforms like Skuid are fast becoming the choice of industry leaders.

That’s because these platforms make it easier to customize apps, and easier to migrate those apps to new cloud systems, or from on-prem to the cloud. With Skuid’s pre-built data integrations, you can interact with your data sources and create customized apps without having to write any code.

These integrations are more than connectors. Rather, they provide a way to incorporate data into your application, and even take action, without code. Finally, both IT teams and business users can get what they want and forge lasting partnerships. With Skuid, you can: