Businesses of all sizes have been influenced into offering digital-first services just to keep up with their customer’s ever-changing expectations, with 72 per cent of all transactions in Australia now facilitated online. It’s not enough to simply offer digital services without truly embracing digital user experiences and all it entails. Businesses are falling short of integrating the disparate data sources that power these experiences, and they’re leaving millions of dollars on the table, with an average of $9.6 million lost each year due to failed digital transformation initiatives.
Research from MuleSoft reveals that 70 per cent of Australian organisations couldn’t deliver the kinds of connected user experiences that customers now expect as standard. It’s easy to mistake the issue as an IT problem, considering more than half of all IT projects weren’t delivered on time in the past 12 months. This doesn’t reveal the root cause of the problem though, especially as the majority of small businesses (89 per cent) are actually increasing their IT budgets in 2022.
IT teams are overburdened
IT teams are falling behind on digital transformation projects due to the mounting pressure to deliver an average of 42 per cent more IT projects. This shouldn’t be an issue with increased IT budgets, but research suggests these funds aren’t being allocated in ways that help the IT team get projects out the door faster and more efficiently. Instead, businesses are needlessly throwing more money into solving the challenges preventing integration, with some organisations spending upwards of $3.6 million on custom integrations. There’s a common challenge that these companies all face when integrating their systems; data silos.
Data silos create major roadblocks
Almost every business (90 per cent) has been affected by data silos when trying to create integrated user experiences. These data silos are often created by legacy applications that were never intended to integrate with modern IT systems, despite containing valuable customer data required to make the kinds of integrated user experiences that customers demand. Without the right knowledge or tools to unlock the data within these silos, organisations are spending more than necessary just to find workarounds to these challenges.
APIs are revolutionising small business
The small businesses that have overcome these challenges have developed clear integration strategies around the use of application programming interfaces, better known as APIs. APIs allow two disparate applications or systems to freely share data between them when they weren’t initially intended to do so, such as integrating the data within a data silo with the rest of the business.
APIs are infinitely reusable, meaning businesses leading transformation through an API-led strategy can create and reuse their assets to create new user experiences and services without needing to build new applications from scratch every single time, saving the IT team time and money. Organisations are increasingly publishing their own APIs for use by third parties, and on average, 46 per cent of organisations’ internal software assets and components can be reused by other developers. Introducing low-code and no-code tools that empower even non-technical users to create their own APIs gives the IT team back the valuable time and resources they need to complete major projects on time. APIs are having a positive impact on their users’ bottom lines, with 46 per cent of organisations growing their revenue in the past 12 months as a direct result of API adoption.
As more customers embrace digital user experiences, IT teams need every advantage they can get their hands on to meet their customers’ expectations and employers. By adopting an API-led strategy towards creating new user experiences, organisations will save themselves time and money in the long run, all while satisfying customers’ changing demands.
