In today’s disruptive times, almost every company is embarking on some sort of digital transformation initiative – reimagining relationships between business users, employees, and business processes and the technology that supports them. At the core of some digitally transformed transformations is data – data about the organization’s operations, data from customers and business partners, and data about the environment.
What makes digital transformation so impactful and effective is that it optimizes the way people interact with data by using technology to implement connections with different data sources, make better decisions, delight more customers, and create new revenue streams. Data integration platforms have a big role to play here.
Data’s role before digital transformation
When digital transformation was not a reality, there was an apparent delineation between the tasks people performed to support business and IT processes and systems that support them.
Data was first created in the real world and then stored or recorded in the digital world. In that business landscape, the data flow between people and machines and across the organization was a constraint to organizations’ productivity and process performance.
The change brought by digital transformation
The primary concept behind digital transformation is getting rid of the notions of barriers that are preconceived between people and technology being necessary. And instead, transforming an environment where business people and technology can communicate, transact, and do business – easily, quickly, and securely.
Digital transformation does not separate business processes from IT processes. In fact, all are processes for digital transformation. The structured interfaces (such as screens, web pages, forms, etc.) between the real and digital world are substituted with a brand new set of capabilities, and those capabilities enable users to interact freely with data. Within this revamped business environment, data silos built for functional IT ecosystems get substituted with enterprise data, so the problem of data silos gets solved.
The role of data integration in driving digital transformation initiatives
Data integration underpins every company’s digital transformation journey. Modern data integration solutions help companies implement data connections with customers or partners quickly, securely, and easily. A lot of these solutions offer self-service-powered features that empower non-technical business users to implement new data connections much more quickly than legacy data integration solutions. When that happens, business workers are able to connect with customers sooner and therefore deliver the value those customers have been promised on time.
Without data integration, it’s almost impossible for companies to achieve their vision of modernized technology-embedded processes. By reckoning integration at the beginning of any digital transformation initiative, companies will be able to integrate and use data in a better way. Because companies are integrating rather than consolidating source systems, the legacy and new processes can co-exist through the transformation process.
So, data integration enables companies to consolidate data, make decisions, deliver the value promised to customers, and ultimately drive their digital transformation initiatives.