Selecting robust data integration solutions is only the beginning of the journey to put healthier, more accurate data at the center of your business. Using healthy data to deliver the value promised to customers and create new revenue streams isn’t just about the software you choose–you should also incorporate a good digital transformation strategy to organize your teams and ensure that you can leverage data to deliver value quickly, securely, and easily.
By creating a company-wide digital transformation strategy, which includes fostering a strong data culture and implementing connections with customers, you’ll be able to achieve improved business outcomes.
The Purpose of a Digital Transformation Strategy
“Digital transformation” is a much-needed business initiative (or a combination of many initiatives) that refers to ways in which organizations implement digital technologies to streamline their business processes and elevate their operational efficiency.
Because of the ongoing disruption, many organizations have needed to reimagine how they transact, function, and deliver. While new technologies and advances in different areas like self-service, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation can offer new opportunities to speed up the digital transformation process, they all bank on data that’s trustworthy, accessible, and accurate. Successful digital transformation projects will implement processes and maintain healthy data to help you identify your customers’ needs and requirements and deliver on them.
The Framework of a Digital Transformation Strategy and Role of Data Integration Platforms
To ensure success, it’s important to develop a strategic framework that can act as a roadmap and demonstrate how digital transformation initiatives will enable your business to meet business objectives. Regardless of which metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) your digital transformation strategy takes into consideration, there are four crucial elements to help you drive transformation initiatives:
1. Bridging the gap between IT and business should be one of the primary outcomes of any digital transformation framework. When IT teams are burdened with handling all data-driven operations, including customer onboarding and data integration, they fail to focus on more high-value tasks. This happens when traditional data integration methods are used. Under such constraints, business workers are strained with fulfilling duties required to facilitate onboarding. They need to act as liaisons between your company and your new customers, garner data field layouts, requirements, and semantics, monitor the status of the new customer onboarding effort, and report on the project status to your business customers. Consequently, business workers take time to connect with customers. When business and IT are not aligned, your company can become a breeding ground for siloed data and inefficiencies. That harms the performance of the business. This problem can be solved using self-service data integration platforms. That’s because self-service empowers non-technical business users to implement connections while freeing IT to drive other strategic business priorities. As a result, self-service helps you bridge the gap between business workers and IT to help you drive business and transformation.
2. Building a strong data culture is fundamental to bringing business and IT on the same page. The most successful shared data cultures depend on impressive technical skills and give power to non-technical business users. When even those business workers can implement data connections, they can quickly connect with them and meet their needs and expectations.
3. Scaling up rapidly can make trusted data accessible throughout the company. IT teams need to be able to enable access to a large number of people to critical, trusted data in a managed and governed way. In order to focus on delivering trust and confidence while reinstating data policies and abiding by external regulations, companies can create a healthy environment of data that is easily discoverable, comprehensible, and of value to the people who require to use it.
4. Leaving no data behind will deliver the most value to your company. As data volumes and environments grow even bigger, that becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming. Using one self-service data integration platform for multiple use cases like data integration, onboarding, and quality can help simplify ecosystems, making it easier to manage corporate data and unlock higher value.