SAP Partner Boomi: Democratized Innovation Through Automation

In a recent partner webinar, SAP partner Boomi spoke about the importance of democratized innovation and its enablement through automation. Democratized innovation, Boomi reminds us, is the process of making technical tools and capabilities accessible to a broader range of people within an organization – including non-technical users.

In the session, Barry Gerdsen, field CTO for ISV/OEM partnerships, Boomi, argued that businesses are coming to realize that innovation can – and should – come from any part of the organization. Doing so empowers non-technical users to perform technical tasks and this can foster creativity and accelerate the development of new ideas.

“Innovation should be for everyone, not just engineers or specialists,” said Gerdsen. “Good IT folks are scarce and often expensive. If as an organization you can empower non-technical users to assume some of the IT lift within your organization, you can take on initiatives more affordably, and you can focus your technical folks on more technical tasks.

“Even more than that is what you gain when you grant non-technical users the ability to express their creativity. In doing so you could be unlocking some really good ideas by people who were previously held back by a lack of technical skill or expertise. What results is a more diverse, inclusive and productive workplace.”

Better tooling allows non-technical users to actively participate in the design and development of digital solutions, while IT maintains control oversight and governance of these solutions.

On this, Gerdsen said: “You want to invest in solutions that enable parallel development. This enables collaboration between users to be able to accelerate the pace of innovation. You also want tooling that allows users to share environments and assets without stepping on each other’s efforts.

“Whatever tooling you choose should offer security to be able to protect sensitive data and to be able to ensure compliance with industry regulations.”

As such, Boomi’s QuickStart interface enables non-technical users to create integrations from scratch within minutes with no training necessary to do it. On the automation product, Gerdsen said that his company’s overall goal in democratizing innovation is to make something that’s easy enough to give to a non-technical user, freeing up the time of an IT developer to take on more complex tasks within the organization.

Through automating routine tasks, Boomi says businesses can operate more efficiently and improve customer satisfaction.

Boomi’s Spaces product, meanwhile, is a collection of shared integration packs that can be used to install, configure, schedule and run integration processes.

Boomi also provides SAP integration to provide efficient data and event-based messages for outbound data and SAP function modules for efficient inbound data.

Regarding Spaces, Gerdsen said the product “allows an organization’s IT Department to offer non-technical users with the ability to select and easily configure integrations from a curated white labeled portal.”

This is process automation, but with a democratized spin that allows innovation can be for everyone.