In its 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report, MuleSoft has found that while 92% of organizations are currently undertaking digital transformation initiatives (or plan to in the next year), 85% of these are slowed by challenges related to integration.
Drawing from a survey of 800 CIOs and IT leaders (managerial or above) from global enterprises on the state of digital transformation and connectivity, the report contains similar insights to AHEAD’s report, State of Enterprise Digital Transformation 2020. Comparatively, their survey of 300 IT decision makers found that 93% of enterprises are undergoing a digital transformation of some kind, and 36% say the combination of legacy system complexity and technical debt are the biggest transformation obstacles.
“CIOs are uniquely positioned to lead their organization’s digital transformation,” explained Simon Parmett, CEO of MuleSoft, in the company’s press release. “IT leaders across all industries must be focused on creating a new operating model that accelerates the speed of delivery, increases organizational agility and delivers innovation at scale.”
“With an API-led approach, CIOs can change the clock speed of their business and emerge as the steward of a composable enterprise to democratize access to existing assets and new capabilities.”
What are the top takeaways from MuleSoft’s report?
For starters, data silos are hindering digital transformation. The pressure to transform is very real, MuleSoft found, with three out of four businesses expecting a decline in revenue if they fail to do so in the next year. Among the top challenges are data silos, with 89% of IT leaders identifying these as an obstacle to digital transformation. And while the average organization has 900 applications, only 28% are currently integrated.
Additional key takeaways include:
1- Organizations are reaping the benefits of APIs: “IT leaders are turning to APIs as the tissue that integrates their applications, systems, and data,” explains the report, and 80% of IT leaders say their organization uses public and/or private APIs.
Over half of respondents said that their organizations leverage APIs as part of their new project development process (52%) or to build new integrations (52%). The result was increased productivity and innovation, and a higher likelihood of completing all or nearly all projects.
2- IT teams with an API strategy drive greater business outcomes: 80% of organizations that have APIs also have some form of strategy in place — which ladder’s back to the previous point about APIs having a profound impact on business outcomes
Organizations with an API strategy were found to have 17.5% higher productivity, compared to those without a strategy.
3- Top-down API strategies are the most effective: While 12% of organizations have a leadership-mandated strategy, these were found to be 36% more productive than those that adopt other API strategies. They also completed 67% more projects than those with a bottom-up strategy.
“One surprising benefit of leadership-mandated API strategies,” the report reads, “is the ability to expand integration skills to teams outside of IT, thereby enabling non-technical “citizen” integrators across the organization.”
