Without the right mindset, strategy, technology, and resources, the way you deal with big data could be hindering your business intelligence (BI), analytics, and innovation goals. The outcome? A stagnant, disintegrated business that fails to meet customer demands and falls behind its competitors. But what you should do to evade this ill fate? Well, you need to avoid three of the biggest integration challenges.
Data Integration Challenges You Can’t Ignore
Here are a few major data integration challenges that your organization must avoid in order to speed up growth.
1. Poor Data Quality
As per a KPMG survey, 77 percent of respondents (out of a group of 400 chief executives) agreed that they had faced internal data quality concerns in their companies.
It’s no secret that this has proven to be one of the most important challenges in the data-driven organization, with a multitude of organizations dealing with this problem on a daily basis. Poor data quality due to “unclean data” can severely harm your business. It can lead to bad analysis and even worse, bad decisions. This not only damages your reputation but also causes revenue loss.
Solution:Data integration solutions need to incorporate more data quality functions to assure that integrated data has the highest value and most impact possible. For this, businesses need to make use of modern integration technologies that allow organizations extract insights from data keeping the quality intact.
2. Lack of Data Security
Data security is another aspect that can’t be ignored. Organizations need to ensure that all data stored are secured and confidential before and post-integration. Poor data security standards in an enterprise can lead to data leakage and data breaches, decreasing data integrity substantially. Companies, therefore, can experience revenue losses and low levels of productivity.
Solution: To deal with data security problems, organizations need to employ a data integration solution that offers an end-to-end encrypted environment for all data that is transferred and exchanged across the business ecosystem. Such a solution only allows authorized and authenticated users to access data, thereby eliminating the risks of breaches or theft.
3. Time-Consuming Data Preparation
As per research, data analysts invest nearly one-third of their time on data preparation. With the increase in data volume and speed, organizations need to look for time, resources, and appropriate manpower to handle data preparation challenges. This, as a result, slows companies’ growth and rate of innovation.
Solution:To combat these challenges, a lot of companies are investing in a new set of technologies such as . Organizations can use these tools to explore, manipulate, and merge new data sources – all without the assistance of IT staff.
Currently, the financial services sector faces a plethora of challenges, including diverse customer demographics, higher capitalization rates, stringent regulations, and the perpetual pressure to streamline revenue generation. To overcome these obstacles and take advantage of fresh opportunities furnished by digitalization, financial units need access to effective integration technology capable of providing real-time data without increasing data management costs.
Gartner states in one of its research that financial units, by integrating high-value and new pieces of information types as well as sources into coherent information management infrastructure, can outperform their industry peers by more than 18 percent. So, integration is clearly a must-have for any financial unit striving to compete at the highest levels today. It improves efficiency and allows units to offer the best customer service ever.
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a glance at the endpoints integrated by customers in the financial industry:
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Customer Relationship Management
- Trading platforms
- Banking software
- Industry-specific applications
- FTP
- SQL server
- Flat files (XLS etc.)
- Insurance Platforms
Integration has provided the necessary push to the financial service sector. It has allowed financial businesses manage and share a large amount of data that wasn’t possible earlier. Let’s take a look at some of the most common benefits offered by integration.
- Moves customer data into a CRM system: There was a point in time when customers of the financial sector used manual methods to complete this process using SQL script. Integration automates this process, making it simpler and easier than before. This, as a result, frees up time for IT teams while giving sales and customer service teams a chance to grab the opportunity to make a sale or solve a problem if any.
- Makes payroll data available in a CRM system: Before integration was introduced, financial units often had to rely on SQL scripts to transfer payroll data such as recent hires and pay period wages into their CRM system. Using a modern integration solution, HR employees can have access to all types of data – from a single database.
- Integrates front and back office systems: When integration technology is used, financial units can create a closed-loop process between CRM and ERP systems. By creating this closed-loop, organizations can become more efficient and ensure that no data is lost during a process such as customer billing.
- Employs an industry-standard application and makes data available: Finance sector has a multitude of applications specific to their function, and making use of these functions is a must. To properly use these applications, a real-time connection is needed. Integration systems help to form this connection and eliminate numerous headaches of logging in to multiple applications to find the required data.
New-age data integration technologies enable financial services use data effectively without slowing down due to complex processes. Whether you want to set crucial data to reside in one application in place of many or allow both HR and payroll teams to access all of the same information using the same database, a robust integration system is all you need.