A single piece of a jigsaw puzzle isn’t worth much all by itself. It needs to be connected to the rest of the puzzle to deliver a meaningful outcome. The same goes for data from various sources. It needs to be properly integrated with other data in the right format to make sense and have meaning.
Organizations receive information from multiple sources, and these separate venues are incorporated to facilitate data-driven operations and deliver the value promised to customers.
Data integration solutions enable businesses to consolidate information and implement data connections, helping stakeholders derive better insights, meet customers’ needs, reduce costs, and grow revenue. Timely integration of vast volumes of heterogenous information is necessary to make this possible.
Technical complexity can make data integration an difficult task. The process becomes even trickier when traditional data integration methods are used.
To put this in perspective, approximately 25 percent of the average annual IT budget is invested in various data integration projects. But what about the returns on investment? As a Mckinsey report stated, the majority of IT projects deliver 56 percent less value than expected.
One of the biggest obstacles faced by organizations is simplifying and speeding the data integration process so that it facilitates faster connections, minimizes cost, optimizes resources, and generates a positive ROI. A robust solution to the problem involves an automated data integration approach driven by modern approaches such as self-service, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. By automating the data integration steps, the entire workload is transferred from IT teams to non-technical business users. And it becomes easier for organizations to connect and meet customers’ needs and requirements and accelerate revenue growth.
Three Questions to Ask
When choosing a data integration solution, organizations tend to overlook certain factors and make common mistakes. Here are questions to ask when evaluating options and comparing potential solutions.
1. Does it empower business users?
If the entire responsibility of implementing data connections falls on the shoulders of IT, then the processes take a great deal of time and unnecessary effort. That’s because IT needs to create custom codes and build data mappings to implement data connections, which takes weeks or months of calendar time. Also, those IT teams become too busy to focus on other high-value business priorities.
This problem can be solved using self-service data integration solutions. Organizations can rely on these solutions to enable non-technical business users to implement data connections while freeing IT to focus on more high-value tasks.
2. Does it onboard customers faster?
When traditional data integration solutions are used, IT teams need to create codes to onboard customers successfully. That consumes time and effort. Also, weeks or months go into performing data integration. When that happens, organizations fail to connect with customers on time, which delays value generation.
By using modern data integration solutions, organizations can empower non-techie business users to onboard customers 80 percent faster. They can leverage self-service data integration solutions to point and click through easy-to-navigate screens to implement onboarding connections much more quickly, securely, and effectively.
3. Does it satisfy customers?
Traditional data integration solutions take time to connect and deliver value to customers. That creates dissatisfaction as organizations fail to deliver the value promised to customers and ultimately accelerate revenue.
The problem can be solved using a modern data integration solution. How?
Self-service data integration solutions help organizations connect with customers and deliver the value they’ve been promised. That satisfies customers, who are more likely to stay longer and to invest in additional products or services. Ultimately, organizations can create new and additional revenue streams, all while avoiding costly customer churn.
Watch a demo to learn how Adeptia’s self-service-powered solution helps organizations perform data integration quickly and efficiently.