As organizations continue to handle more data and adopt more applications, the need for that data and applications to work together has never been greater.
But serious challenges in integrating data and connecting applications persist, forcing employees to jump between apps to get access to data, integrate data to access different applications manually, and inevitably, lose insights that can help companies make informed decisions.
Why is the process of integrating data and applications so difficult?
1. Common data integration methods are slow, ineffective, and expensive.
Currently, data integration methods require IT teams to create custom codes and perform extensive data mappings to consolidate data and applications, which takes weeks or even months to complete. During that time, business workers must wait to connect with customers, which results in customer dissatisfaction. What’s more, these delays add to the company’s overhead expenses, and companies often have to hire additional experts to handle the operation, which further increases costs.
Moreover, every in-house integration involves tedious custom coding that only a limited number of its IT staff can comprehend and modify. This makes integration-building efforts almost impossible to scale. It also leaves organizations vulnerable when IT teams who build them and learn how they work ultimately leave them.
2. The opportunities for integration are difficult to keep pace with
As organizations get increased access to more data and applications, their integration and opportunities increase, and are difficult to keep up with.
Clearly, integrating new applications with existing technological systems and then building workflows between them can improve how organizations do business. However, the roadblocks prevent organizations from executing these new integration opportunities quickly and at scale.
3. Emerging business ecosystems make point-to-point integrations a bigger burden
As companies launch more than 30 percent of applications for best-of-breed alternatives every year, a majority of organizations will need to be reimplemented.
This experience can be immensely frustrating for companies that heavily rely on custom-built integrations. The process of searching for integrations that leverage applications the organizations have replaced can be difficult and time-consuming. What’s more, knowing how to replace those integrations with ones that rely on newly adopted applications can be difficult, too. Making things worse, both stages become more difficult when the IT experts who built the integrations and know how they function have left the company.
How Can Self-service Data Integration Be a Game Changer?
Modern data integration solutions with self-service and automation capabilities enable non-technical business users to consolidate data and applications much more quickly than traditional data integration solutions. IT teams no longer need to create custom codes and build data mappings. In fact, they can devote the time to focus on more strategic, high-value business priorities.
When business workers can connect with customers faster, they can identify the needs of those customers and meet them much sooner. As a result, those customers are satisfied, and they’re likely to buy more products or services, remain with the company longer, and spread the word to other potential clients.