In the past, IT departments embarked on huge enterprise application integration programmes to connect silos of business software data. IT no longer has the luxury of being able to plan such a long-term strategy, however. The age of software as a service (SaaS) and public cloud-based computing has led to an explosion of applications, each creating their own data silo, which centralised IT is unlikely to be in a position to support.
The debate, according to Andrew Comes, a principal analyst at Gartner, is control and quality versus speed. “A central integration team can be a bottleneck,” he says.
