Data is the most crucial resource within every business. But it’s hardly a limited resource. The truth, in fact, is the opposite. As a business expands and grows, the amount of data it needs to consolidate, analyze, and load will grow as well. Companies continue to add new, myriad systems and applications at a breakneck pace, which ultimately increases data volume. Now, the growing volume can prove to be a mammoth challenge for companies to manage, delaying value generation and revenue growth. And without ready access to clean, accurate data, companies fail to garner the insights they need to meet customers’ needs and deliver the value promised to them.
But companies can manage their customer data in an easy, speedy, and secure manner with smart data integration. Currently, in the wake of disruption, businesses have a wide range of solutions to integrate voluminous, highly complex customer data at their disposal to deliver value to customers. That’s beneficial because unlocking the power of data gives companies a competitive advantage.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss data integration, its importance, and its benefits in detail.
What is Data Integration?
Data integration is a process of bringing data from multiple data sources together in order to provide a single view. It enables businesses to connect all the data sources of your company in one unified place. Data integration starts with the ingestion process and encompasses related steps such as data cleansing, ETL mapping, and transformation. Apparently, a universal approach to data integration isn’t a reality. Albeit, data integration solutions include a few common elements, which include a set of data sources, the main server, and clients accessing data from the main server.
Why is Data Integration Important?
Data integration solutions enable businesses to implement data connections easily, quickly, and securely. With features such as pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards and intuitive screens, AI-data mapping, and more, business users can build data integrations in a fast and secure manner. Ultimately, users can analyze the data and garner actionable insights to make informed decisions.
The use cases of data integration solutions are immense. As a matter of fact, it has become prominent in most industries, including healthcare, retail, finance, and more. Organizations, by and large, have come to an understanding that data integration is the only step to unlocking its potential. When they have all the required information in one place, they can find and use the actionable insights within it. Business users can strategically implement these insights into their business operations, and this is what delivers them a competitive edge.
What Are the Benefits of Data Integration?
When traditional data integration methods are used, IT integrators need to perform data integration steps all by themselves. That takes weeks or months of calendar time. Because IT takes time to implement connections, customers are forced to wait to connect with business users. Consequently, companies take time to deliver the promised value to customers, making them frustrated and unhappy. Now, it’s unlikely that such unhappy customers will buy more products or services from the company, delaying revenue and value generation. Also, because IT is busy implementing data integration steps, it struggles to focus on other priority tasks.
Fortunately, modern data integration solutions enable businesses to overcome these problems and open the door to a range of benefits for businesses of all sizes:
- Empowers non-technical business users: It enables non-technical business users to implement data connections in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months. Non-technical users can perform data integration steps, and ultimately they can connect with customers instantly.
- Onboards data 80 percent faster: Non-technical users can create onboarding connections up to 80 percent faster. They can point and click through easy-to-navigate screens to onboard customers in minutes instead of months.
- Frees up IT headcount: While business users are busy implementing data connections, IT becomes free to focus on other priority tasks and drive value. In other words, IT need not create custom codes and extensive data mappings. Instead, it can drive more strategic business tasks.
- Facilitates customers’ delight and satisfaction: When business users connect with customers quickly, they can address their needs and deliver the value they’ve promised customers on time. Consequently, customers feel delighted and happy and feel inspired to invest in other products or services, thus creating new revenue streams for the business.