Rapidly growing companies are always on the move, with every team focused on developing and marketing products. With this intense focus on expansion, who has the time to manage the applications that make it all happen?
Technology leaders managing a mix of platforms and SaaS systems know this struggle. An average mid-market organisation runs well over a hundred unique applications with integration tools necessary to connect them. Controlling this sprawl while maintaining security and keeping pace with business demands is a balancing act. This is where integration and automation platforms come into the picture - serving as the backbone that connects and orchestrates everything else.
Why do most organisations struggle with automation?
Most businesses fall into one of two categories. Some prioritise speed - they are content with temporary fixes, leaving the long-term consequences for later. Others want to adopt new technology but are held back by established processes and slow IT cycles.
In both cases, automation is treated as a series of compromises: speed against stability, agility against security, growth against sustainability. Both sides recognise the urgency, but the response is usually too little, too late.
Automation is often framed as a tension between business units who want flexibility and IT departments who insist on control. Neither approach alone provides a complete solution.
What happens when speed and control are out of balance?
When business teams move fast without governance, they create a costly and disjointed mix of disconnected solutions. This generates data security concerns and, paradoxically, stifles innovation by creating isolated silos of information.
When IT controls everything through rigorous process, development slows down, costs increase, and request queues grow. Each change goes through the same checks and approvals regardless of complexity. The gap between what the business needs and what IT can deliver widens.
Both approaches reduce the relationship between business and technology teams to an exchange of requirements and deliverables - treating colleagues as though they belong to separate organisations. Collaboration and creativity suffer.
How does modern integration solve this?
A modern integration and automation platform combines a business-friendly experience with enterprise security and governance, while retaining the scalability required for growth. Instead of choosing between speed and control, organisations get both.
Business teams can create and manage straightforward automations for processes they understand. Technical teams can add complex customisations, suggest improvements, and ensure governance without bottlenecking every request. The result is collaboration rather than negotiation.
At Digital Experience Labs, we design and build the integration layer that connects business systems, orchestrates workflows, and automates end-to-end processes. Whether that means connecting a policy administration system to a rating engine, synchronising operational data across distribution platforms, or automating a multi-channel application process - the pattern is the same. The Process Automation & Integration capability is how we deliver it.
"Integration is not a technical project. It is the connective tissue that determines whether your automation actually works."
For an introduction to how process automation works, read What is process automation?
Frequently asked questions
Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a cloud-based platform that connects applications, data, and processes across an organisation. It replaces point-to-point custom integrations with a managed layer that is faster to build, easier to maintain, and more reliable at scale.
Integration is the foundation that process automation runs on. Automating a process end-to-end requires data to flow between systems reliably. Without a solid integration layer, automation breaks at every handoff point.
When you find teams re-keying data between systems, processes breaking because systems don't communicate, or automation failing because the data it depends on is unreliable. These are signs that the integration layer needs attention before further automation will succeed.