What is data integration?

At its heart, data integration is about data transparency and availability. Rather than siloing data into individual systems and tools, organisations can access all relevant data through an entire company network, sharing information seamlessly across systems and departments.

Data integration also goes further, converting the data into a usable format that users at all levels can more easily digest and put to work.

This provides several advantages for businesses that correctly apply data integration solutions:

Many business systems tend to operate in isolation, failing to integrate effectively to share data between them. Unfortunately, when data becomes siloed, other departments and systems have difficulty accessing it, reducing the effectiveness of every system on the network. Data integration eliminates those barriers, allowing data to flow freely and improving the return on investment (ROI) of individual systems.

When data integration relies on manually locating, converting and moving data, data quality suffers. Automated data integration preserves data quality as it moves between systems, by applying automated data transformation governed by predefined business rules.

With reliable data always at hand, organisations have a solid foundation for making informed, fact-based decisions. Confident in the knowledge that their data is accurate and up-to-date, teams across the organisation can improve their decision-making capabilities.

Manually collecting, transforming and combining data is not only imprecise; it is also extremely time consuming. Data integration takes this responsibility out of employee hands, freeing them up to concentrate on more strategic concerns and provide better value to the company.

Without a completely holistic view of the data, account executives lack a necessary resource for interacting with customers and partners. Data integration empowers these professionals with the information they need to build, secure and improve vital business relationships.

Here we address some of the possible hurdles to successful data integration and how to recognise them:

Many modern businesses rely on a range of systems, applications and tools to manage accounts and guide decisions. Billing, marketing, lead generation and customer service are only a few and each system creates data. In many cases, these different systems are being maintained by different teams without any unified processes for managing that data. When data is not standardised, it runs the risk of duplication, improper formatting and being overlooked.

Information silos are a major threat to data transparency. As different departments gather data and store it in their own systems, other departments may be looking for insights relevant to that information with no way of knowing that the data they require has already been collected. Data must be easily available to any authorised department that needs it, regardless of where it originates.

Many companies take a more-is-better approach to data collection. But too much data may not necessarily be a good thing, potentially making the valuable hidden gems of data more difficult to identify and extract. Without proper data management, collecting data from multiple channels can create data clutter, burying the vital data that could otherwise be turned into actionable business insights.

Unfortunately, not all data integration software is the right fit for every use case. And even with the right software, some companies create problems for themselves by failing to use it correctly. Understanding data-integration solutions and how best to apply them can help ensure that the data is where it needs to be and in the right format.