If the tumult of the past two years isn’t proof enough that supply chain ecosystems globally are being tested and their data integration strategies scrutinized, we don’t know what is.
All the recent news coverage about labor issues, port backups, product shortages, and shipping shortages has raised consumers’ awareness and caused ripples in the boardrooms. It has driven home the point to CIOs that something must be done to avoid a repeat performance in the future.
From Adeptia’s perspective, addressing the crises, broadly speaking, comes down to fundamentals – reimagine data integration technology so that companies have greater visibility and control over their digital ecosystems so they safeguard their relationships and manage their ease of doing business when disruption hit.
If the supply chain debacle has surfaced one absolute imperative for every business or one required attribute that should be the top of the list of every integrator’s 2022 wish list, that need would definitely be agility.
Agility is a measure of survival. When you are agile, your ability to respond to any situation or scenario is at its best. Think about this: Why only agile companies like Amazon, Uber, or Zoom are the dominant industry leaders – and why those that are not agile are at risk of slow death or extinction?
Keeping the mission-criticality of supply chain integration in mind, we asked a question for this blog: What should integration specialists be mindful of in order to manage supply chain disruption and be more agile?
Here are some points that companies must keep in mind in 2022 to drive business faster.
Some Business Trends to Watch Out for in 2022
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems are and will keep playing a vital role in enabling various data-driven operations such as data mapping, data integration, and more. Not only do these solutions improve accuracy but also speed.
Apart from that, AI-enabled solutions are very simple to use, and they do not need any additional technical expertise to utilize them for diverse operations. In order words, they empower even non-technical business users to map and integrate customer data in a secure and speedy way. Gartner expects AI to account for 10% of all data produced by 2025, up from less than 1% today.
Data Fabric
In the past few years, the number of data and data silos has surged, while the number of people in data analytics (D&A) teams has either stayed constant or even decreased. Data fabrics – flexible, robust integration of data across business users and platforms – have emerged to streamline a company’s data integration infrastructure and build a scalable architecture that reduces the technical debt that resides in most D&A teams owing to rising integration challenges.
Data fabric helps teams improve data usage with its in-built analytics, cutting data management efforts by up to 70% and accelerating time-to-value.
Decision Intelligence (DI)
A company’s decision-making ability is a significant source of competitive advantage, but it’s becoming more demanding.
Decision intelligence improves decision-making. In doing so, it helps business users understand and engineer how decisions are made and business outcomes evaluated, and managed, and enhanced through feedback. As per Gartner, a third of large companies will be leveraging decision-intelligence for enabling decision-making, to gain competitive advantage and grab bigger market share.
Self-Service Integration
Most companies are placing their bets on IT integrators to onboard and integrate large volumes of data from customers or partners. However, this strays the IT teams away from focusing on more important or strategic tasks. Under these constraints, self-service integration is what organizations need.
Self-service integration platforms enable business users (even the non-technical ones) to rapidly create connections and integrate new customers across their supply chain ecosystems- securely and easily. Meanwhile, IT becomes free to focus on more important tasks.
Companies that wish to manage supply chain disruption and embrace “the new agile” environment need to focus on adopting these technologies. That will help them keep up and get ahead of whatever the market throws their way.