A digital business requires companies to have a well-connected infrastructure. However, your digital transformation initiatives will fall flat without a robust data integration strategy.
Integration is challenging because there are ever-changing requirements, such as emerging customer needs, new business initiatives, technology evolution, mergers and acquisitions, competitive manuevers, and newly formed partnerships, making it a moving target. And in the current disruption era, you need to support these requirements while minimizing costs or keeping costs under control.
By reimagining the data integration approach, you can cut down the cost per integration, improve integration reliability, increase business user and IT productivity, and free up resources to drive innovation.
Here are three ways you can minimize data integration costs and improve business productivity:
1. Avoid Point-to-Point and Accelerate Time-to-Value
In the current times, the IT footprint is dynamic, with new partners, upgrades, mergers and acquisitions, and more. Every time a business adds a new system, they need to integrate it with multiple existing applications and databases. That can be time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, it slows down projects to a large extent. Companies need to make sure that their onboarding routines are quick and easy. If it takes weeks or months of calendar time to onboard a customer, they find it difficult to make a good first impression and ultimately deliver value.
Let’s suppose there is an organization that wants to maximize the availability of tests, drugs, and other medical supplies to each region and facilitate high-quality inventory insights to its centralized distribution unit. Rather than consolidating data through point-to-point, companies can rely on self-service integration to streamline the gathering of raw data from disparate sources (including nursing homes, hospitals, and other medical units) and speed up insights delivery for improved value generation and patient experiences.
By using self-service integration platforms, companies can empower business users to create data connections in minutes. It allows even non-technical users to onboard customer data 80 percent faster, and therefore deliver the promised value and delightful CXs. Organizations can save a lot of time and effort with a self-service integration solution. At the same time, IT users are freed to focus on governance and more important tasks instead.
2. Eliminate Hand Coding and Improve Productivity
Integrating data manually takes a lot of time and effort. Hand coding not only brings risk and cost into a business environment but also lowers productivity. It often puts a lot of pressure on IT to write long hours of coding and execute EDI mapping.
Implementing a self-service integration platform can help companies combine data without seeking IT teams to write custom code. It eliminates the need to create custom coding to onboard, map, and integrate complex customer data. Features like pre-built application connectors, dashboards and intuitive screens, AI data mapping, shared templates, and more enable even non-techies to build integrations and drive data exchange while freeing IT to focus on innovation-driven tasks.
3. Reduce Costs and Risks Associated with Leveraging Unreliable Data
A self-service integration approach empowers governance of data flowing in and out of applications and facilitates access to a “single source of truth.” It enables companies to converge all the data sources, validate information, and integrate data at speed, thus improving ease of doing business, reducing costs, and ultimately growing revenue.
Along with that, it provides an end-to-end encrypted environment to allow only authenticated users to access and analyze data streams for better decision-making. Thus, the risks of breaches are lower. Companies can, therefore, deliver accurate actionable insights and make improved decisions.
In short, companies can cut down costs and drive productivity by eliminating point-to-point integration and manual coding and using self-service integration solutions instead.