What Is the Goal of Data Integration?

Data’s power in the business world today is unmatched. It fuels the right tools and provides the best business analytics for business managers to achieve their key performance indicators (KPIs). But maintaining data efficiency as you add on new systems, data volumes, and customers can be daunting. This has made data integration a prioritized topic, especially as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and cloud environments gain more ground. This guide delves into the goal of data integration and why many business analysts are increasingly investing in deeper integration efforts.

Data Integration Definition

The popular term ‘every company is a software company’ implies that businesses are churning huge volumes of data now more than before. These data assets come from numerous data sources and may have multiple formats. Companies may create silos with every new strain of data added to their database, making data management complex and capital intensive.

What is data integration, and how does the integration process afford businesses a one-stop solution to eliminate these challenges?

Data integration bundles technical and business methodologies used to combine data from multiple sources into a unified view of the data. Key data integration techniques include data warehousing, data consolidation, data virtualization, and hand-coding.

Generally, the process begins by ingesting raw data into data integration solutions. The input goes through several stages like cleansing, ETL mapping, data transformation, etc.

The Goal of Data Integration

The result, which is also the overarching importance of data integration, ensures real-time and consistent access to information as it flows through different systems and sources. Generally, parsing all your data into a single source with a comprehensive data integration platform can improve data quality which is crucial across your entire organization.

Benefits of Data Integration

Some specific ways you can benefit from integration solutions include:

Increased competitiveness:

Effective organizations rely on better business decisions and consistent operations to increase competitiveness in their industries.

A huge part of this depends on an organization’s fast-paced access to relevant information. The level of detail and quality associated with your business intelligence outputs also matters. Data integration’s single-source system can help you streamline your data management efforts focusing on effective insights into new growth opportunities. Cloud-based data integration solutions can also help you scale your business according to specific business needs without limitations on legacy applications and cloud systems.

Enhanced Customer relations:

Data integration gives you a unified view of your organization’s data. That means you can access unlimited customer information to personalize user experience and customer relationship management solutions. Many SaaS applications lighten the load on your IT team by providing point-click and drag-drop templates. But they still need tailoring to your own customers’ needs. Integration solutions can be a great option to generate a 360 view of your customers, enabling customer service teams to personalize their campaigns. With an effective integration solution, it’s easier to link and enjoy the full benefits of different systems like MicrosoftDYnamics and Salesforce, focusing on leveraging your customer data rather than wasting time on data entry.

Improved operational efficiency:

Managing different systems with manual processes can be time-consuming and stressful. Businesses seeking continuous improvement can find data integration’s impact on operational efficiency helpful. According to the International Data Corporation, analysts spend close to nine hours each week finding the right information to support operations. The more time you spend loading and cleaning your data, the less time you may have to put it to work.

Data integration can streamline business performance by seamlessly integrating multiple formats and types into a single unit. The automation features can help eliminate duplicates and errors as the integration occurs. That way, you can focus on higher-value work tasks to improve business performance across your organization and revenues. All in all, data integration focuses on unifying data from different systems, making it more valuable for your business users and IT department.