By Manoj Choudhary, CTO of Jitterbit

The Name of the Game in 2020 - IT Agility and Employee Empowerment

IT agility and employee empowerment will be the name of the game in 2020 for two key reasons.

First, as businesses undergo digital transformation to enable great customer experiences, IT teams will no longer be able to serve as gatekeepers when it comes to the selection of new enterprise applications. Today's employees are well versed in their line-of-business technologies and want to be able to quickly implement their own best of breed applications to support their customers. IT teams will need to learn how to be fast and flexible to give line-of-business owners and other customer-facing employees the ability to securely implement their own best of breed technologies.

Second, those best of breed technologies and applications are hitting the market in unprecedented numbers and faster than ever before. The new pace of technology innovation will require IT departments to become more agile so they can quickly adopt different incremental technologies and applications, rather than trying to completely overhaul existing IT systems.

As a result, IT leaders will increasingly adopt enterprise integration technologies to support both of these significant shifts.

Citizen Technologists Take the Reins

Business leaders are digitally savvy and they know how to find and adopt new cloud-based technologies to meet their customers' needs. They've become Citizen Technologists, and IT teams should embrace and support them. But many of the new technologies adopted by business leaders do not work in a vacuum: they need to integrate with other systems and applications within the enterprise in order to deliver value. To speed up that crucial integration, IT leaders are increasingly pushing business leaders to invest in low-code and no-code integration platforms and solutions. Such solutions leverage simple interfaces built on APIs to deliver a positive experience for the end users, whether internal or external, so business users can quickly and easily integrate different systems and applications without relying on IT.

New Technologies Demand Speed and Agility

With so many innovative applications becoming available, it is increasingly apparent that adopting best of breed solutions can solve business problems that used to require complete IT system overhauls. This shift to iterative changes means that IT departments need to be much more agile than they were in the past to keep up with the pace of business.

By building an IT department that is agile, you create a team that can deliver solutions to business problems quickly and iteratively through a build, test, tweak and deploy process. Agile methodology also removes the bottleneck of having to build the entire functionality before learning if it is the right solution.

Integration and APIs in 2020

Low-code and no-code integration offerings, working seamlessly with APIs, work like magic to ensure the complex coding functionalities and data integration details are handled behind the scenes so that non-tech users can quickly and easily solve their problems without burdening IT. As we speed into 2020, these offerings will proliferate, enabling every employee to securely and reliably connect disparate data sets and applications and extract information from any back-end systems without having to go to IT.

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About the Author

Manoj Chaudhary is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering, leading the technical side of product strategy as well as technology development and operations. Prior to this role, Manoj involved with Jitterbit as a technical adviser, helping to guide the company's pioneering transition to a multi-tenant cloud architecture.