Digital transformation is a foundational change in how an organization uses data, technology, people, and processes and delivers value to its customers. For many companies, this means rethinking their ways to access data spread across business ecosystems.
Data is the key element in solving some of the biggest challenges companies are facing and unlocking new business opportunities. It also plays a central role in allowing organizations to understand and evolve their relationships with customers, and is the cornerstone of creating delightful experiences.
The challenge is that data comes from everywhere. Consequently, much of an enterprise’s data resides within disparate silos scattered across partner ecosystems, making it difficult for them to integrate and unlock its value.
Organizations need to navigate this challenge if they want to unlock the true potential of data, deliver value, and ultimately transform business faster. Here, the role of modern data integration platforms comes into play.
Modern data integration solutions enable organizations to overcome data silos and realize the full potential of all the data streams.
Barriers to Agility
Most organizations today are faced with an unwieldily setup characterized by siloed data. Normally, this data includes non-homogenous, inconsistent data streams. Most of the data is complex due to a number of reasons such as acquisition, the disparity in systems, and changing market dynamics. Organizations find it difficult to take that data and analyze it completely. Consequently, insights delivery and decision-making suffer.
A lot of businesses rely on legacy systems such as point-to-point integration to handle the problem. No doubt, these solutions can handle data streams when the volume and complexity are low. But as soon as the volume and complexity go up, using a point-to-point approach to create data connection can prove costly and time-consuming. To add, these solutions compel IT teams to do all the work, from onboarding data to integrating and analyzing it, and so they are not able to focus on more high-value tasks. This slows down innovation.
What companies want is to remove the burden on their IT teams and bring all users at the forefront of business so that they can drive innovation and business value outcomes in a repeatable, ongoing way, not waiting 18 months or two years to deliver a major change. These problems can be easily solved by the reimagining data integration approach.
Related White paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
The True Value of Data
By revamping the data integration approach, companies can unlock, consolidate, and act on their data – securely and easily. It allows organizations to onboard and integrate complex, bi-directional data streams in minutes instead of months while putting IT on a governance role. Meaning, it allows non-technical business users to harness the siloed data and create connections, while IT teams can take up the role of governance and focus on more important tasks instead.
Self-service integration by enabling business users (with albeit minimal technical expertise) can quickly unlock data value and ultimately deliver the promised value to customers. It fosters much higher levels of data agility and this allows companies to make quicker decisions and grow revenue. And that allows business users to deliver business goals.