Last year, CIOs and CEOs had to adopt new business models to sustain growth during an unpredictable time. As a result, leaders invested in new technology to enable seamless experiences for customers and employees, and so their teams could remain agile through the ever-changing IT landscape. Needless to say, they’ve had their hands full, and it doesn’t look like things will be slowing down in 2022.
Hybrid and distributed ecosystems have become the norm which adds complexity to the IT landscape. Today, 92% of enterprises have a multi‐cloud strategy, while 82% have a hybrid cloud set‐up. This year, business and IT teams will need to embrace the challenges of this reality by finding new and more sustainable ways to deliver the rapid change that organizations, employees, and customers have come to expect. MuleSoft thought leaders give their take on what’s ahead in 2022 and how organizations can navigate, grow, and thrive in an increasingly connected world.
Seven MuleSoft business leaders share their 2022 digital imperatives
1. Building a digital HQ for improved employee experiences
With everyone working from anywhere, our digital HQ will continue to become more important than our physical HQ in the coming year. There is an imperative for employee experiences to be seamless. In 2022, more companies will look to implement a strategy that empowers teams across their organization with easy access to the apps and data they need to do their jobs most effectively. CIOs will need to drive collaboration among the organization by enabling both IT and business teams to access, unlock, and integrate data and apps in a secure, governed manner.
Brent Hayward, CEO, MuleSoft
2. Enabling agility by building a composable business
2022 will be the year of composable business. The pandemic accelerated digital transformation to a huge extent, compelling organizations to quickly enable online customer interactions and remote employees. It was a turning point in the digital age and there is no turning back. Just as the assembly line was the right structure for the manufacturing age, composability–turning business capabilities into reusable, connectable building blocks through APIs–is the right structure for the digital age. Whereas many companies will now spend time and money cleaning up quick fixes from the past two years, composable businesses can innovate with their building blocks by providing integrated user experiences, automated business processes, as well as having enterprise-wide visibility and control through API management. Agility through composability is the only way to sustain digital success.
Matt McLarty, Global Field CTO and VP of Digital Transformation, MuleSoft
3. Breaking down silos to unlock data
The exponential acceleration of digitization this past year has led to a data explosion – and it will only continue to grow. To be a successful data‐driven organization in 2022, organizations must break down silos across their enterprise to create a single source of truth. This requires managing data end‐to‐end, from ingestion and integration through to analytics and the critical decisions it drives. Ultimately, this end‐to‐end data strategy will hold the key to unlocking enterprise data and empowering all business teams to deliver value for the customers.
Rita Jackson, Interim CMO and VP of Product Marketing, MuleSoft
4. Creating a composable enterprise to win the digital race
The acceleration of digitization has led to an explosion of hyper-specialized offerings like payment platforms and cloud data hosting. So the path to agility is to tap into the innovation done by others in your ecosystem by building a composable business underpinned by the right integration, API, and automation strategy. In 2022, the winner in this digital race will be the one who integrates the fastest, not the one that creates the fastest.
Prashant Choudhary, Field CTO AMER, MuleSoft
5. Driving growth with positive customer experiences and employee experiences
Just as consumer expectations have changed amid the pandemic, so too have the employees’ expectations, who increasingly demand modern, user-friendly tools to spin up new services and experiences. However, employees without programming knowledge or technical expertise have been turned off from using APIs due to their perceived complexity. This is where low-code and no-code platforms come into play, which allows non-tech-savvy employees to securely integrate their data sets to create new solutions using building block-like APIs rather than typing lines of code.
Grace Micallef, Regional VP Industries at MuleSoft
6. Embracing a digital-first mindset from the top down
We’ve seen how successful Australians have shifted to working from home, so it’s critical that employers pay close attention to how their employees’ expectations have changed since then. Australian businesses already have to contend with chronic skills shortages prior to the pandemic, so if they want to hang on and attract highly-skilled workers, they’ll need to center digital-first experiences and workplace flexibility as their recruitment strategy.
Australian businesses won’t be able to do this until they truly embrace digital transformation, which goes beyond a one-off investment in a collaboration tool. Technology that enables automation will be key to embracing the digital future of work, empowering business teams to be self-reliant whether in the office, at home, or anywhere else in the world. CIOs must take responsibility for driving this mindset and encouraging both IT and business teams alike to unlock and integrate their data sets if they want to take advantage of their own digital transformation efforts.
Marc Caltabiano – Vice President – Australia and New Zealand, MuleSoft
7. Unlocking productivity through automation
Companies are increasingly turning to automation to unlock productivity and create seamless experiences. However, automating work in our work-from-anywhere world is more difficult than ever because data and systems are becoming ever more fragmented. In 2022, companies will look to hyperautomation by combining integration, APIs, and automation delivered on a single unified platform. Doing so will enable them to securely manage workflows across multiple silos of data and systems at scale.
Meir Amiel, CPO, MuleSoft
In this new year, it will continue to be crucial to meet customer and employee demands in today’s all-digital, work-from-anywhere world through strategic approaches to integration, analytics, automation, and more. Check out the top seven digital transformation trends in 2022 that will shape digital business and learn how you can prepare for the challenges and opportunities ahead.
