There is no doubt that there are simple tools out there for comparing the IPaaS market. Many business leaders turn to analysts for the answers.

The next evolution of IPaaS and Service Integration solutions is now well and truly with us. However, many businesses are yet to make the leap forward and are stuck with their same old, slow and expensive implementations. The traditional ways of doing things rely heavily on API-led integrations, hand-coded connections and third parties to oversee setup and maintenance.

IPaaS has always been a slow and boring exercise. Not only is the market taken up by incumbent software providers, but it’s made even more tiring by the huge amount of project management and outsourcing needed to plan, create and maintain your integrations.

Outages and downtime are the most visible failures in IT to the wider business. In many organisations the reputation and trust in IT hangs in the uptime of their services. As a result, for most IT leaders managing service availability is not just about providing great service, but also very much about managing key relationships, gaining support from other departments and even securing funding.

Business Service Management is a key strategic area for any enterprise to focus on in order to become competitive and agile in today’s complex and fast-paced marketplaces. However, many leaders struggle to see their various departments working together in a truly collaborative and integrated way, in order to realise the long-term benefits.

Service Desks and their respective managers are very much the unsung heroes of the IT department. As more ‘app-led working cultures grow and emerge within the workplace, the team at the coalface of the department can quickly lose clout to the ‘rock star’ developers and ‘IT owned’ product managers.

Organisations, their suppliers and partners can often find themselves in situations where they are (intentionally and unintentionally) working across several service desk or service management tools. This is not immediately a bad thing. However, it can often be a ‘complex’ thing.

When we see different businesses approaching integration projects, we can often follow success and failure back to some very early on decisions. These decisions sit well within the strategy stages of the project and more often than not, failures come down to a distinct lack of strategy.

Most IT teams trick themselves into thinking they have an integration strategy, when really all they have is a project plan. I have spent over a decade working with IT teams and pretty much all of them, when asked to present a strategy either have nothing at all or pull out a spreadsheet of dates and tasks.

What slows down an integration project?