Enterprise Data Integration: Shaping Your Enterprise’s Survivability

Enterprise data integration is an inseparable companion of every joint partnership or merger/acquisition because when enterprises blend their businesses, data from the two companies need to be brought together. Uniform, structured data is necessary to make informed decisions, get operational insights, form strategies and bolster customer experiences. In this article, we talk about enterprise integrations and organizational politics, effective data architecture, and scalable data integration techniques necessary to transform a company’s distributed data into a valuable resource of meaningful information.

What is Enterprise Data Integration?

Technically, the term enterprise data integration means “the consolidation of business information or data sets from various sources, and sometimes various formats, and then compiling them into one accessible interface.” Data integration can be a challenging task but it is the cornerstone of the digital transformation of business processes aimed at obtaining a comprehensive view of the enterprise and ensuring that all the valuable information the company has is accessible and available for modern AI-powered business information (BI) tools.

Why Data Integration is Important for Enterprises

Forbes analysts revealed that over 80% of enterprise business operation leaders say data integration is critical to ongoing operations. However, as usual, the devil is in the details, and this optimistic percentage does not mean that all those enterprises use enterprise data integration in the best possible way. Let’s find out the core pain points and advantages that can be obtained through enterprise applications integration or enterprise systems integration.

More Data Means More Problems

The number of data sources that enterprises need in the course of their business grows, and so grows their need to bring all that data together. Even in one large company, every department uses many possible resources to tackle its own goals and problems.

The number of different data resources (in-house or cloud-based) to be brought together to reap the benefits of an enterprise BI tool can reach several dozen. According to various sources, the number of applications a large enterprise uses on average is 187 to 190.

Better Data Builds Better Businesses

In today’s rapidly changing business environment every company is a data company. While effectively implementing enterprise data integration solutions, companies get numerous benefits and open the door for new revenue opportunities.

The outcomes of successful and efficient enterprise data integration include:

• Faster time to value: With successful enterprise system integration and the right architecture in place, companies are able to increase the value received with artificial intelligence (AI) business tools. The maximum efficiency in data use allows for consistent data analysis and the ability to derive insights much more quickly, thus significantly bolstering the bottom line.
• Better visibility through enterprise integration application: With proper and fine-tuned enterprise integration systems companies can get a clear view of integration activity via a centralized dashboard that provides streamlined reporting and synchronized insight for stakeholders.
• Bolstered productivity of enterprise teams: Efficient enterprise software integration reduces the burden on the enterprise’s in-house IT team (or reduces the amount of effort by an outsourced IT-partner team). It also creates operational shortcuts and templated workflows while unlocking the resources of teams so they can be applied to productive and business-oriented activities to harness more output.
• Fine-tuned adoption of new apps and data: An appropriate and customized infrastructure based on the enterprise data integration solution ensures that new data sources and applications are entering the fold in a streamlined and routine manner. It also reduces the time to onboard new supply chain partners and their data. That allows organizations to incorporate data, manage it, and provide it to their workforce to become more data-driven and to get easy-to-understand answers for making smarter decisions.
• Stronger lead generation and more opportunities: Having all necessary data on hand in a single interface allows your teams to pinpoint and act on opportunities by clarifying market trends and shifts in demand. Actionable analytics is a game-changer in any industry, and enterprise integration into the BI is a must for generating valuable insights from data.

What’s So Special About Enterprise Application Integration?

The findings from Gartner’s 2019 Business Application Integration Survey show the top five integration scenarios enterprises deal with include:

1. 1. Analytical or BI environments (cited by 86% of the survey respondents)
   2. Legacy systems (79%)
   3. Partners and ecosystems (68%)
   4. Creation of a single source of data (65%)

1. HR-related applications (63%)

Another recent Gartner survey, the 2021 Hyperautomation Survey, shows that 11% of business technologists see an enterprise integration platform as a service (EiPaaS) as one of the three most-used tools to facilitate business-driven automation initiatives. However, these business technologies on average employ the capabilities of two vendors’ solutions.

The ultimate goal of an enterprise when selecting enterprise data integration tools is to facilitate important DataOps best practices and empower data engineers to deploy the most effective and efficient data integration pipelines that will result in building successful, repeatable, and scalable data solutions to be used by the enterprise in its everyday business activities.

Modern enterprise data integration platforms have to be flexible, powerful, and fast to transform all the data the enterprise has into a comprehensive view of the business and its activities. The final solution must present all the enterprise data in one place, integrated, organized, and curated into views that they can easily understand.

As a rule, the best solutions allow for:

• Flexibility – to be able to connect and integrate anything (on-premises, cloud integration, mobile devices, deployed infrastructure, IoT) at any time.
• Scalability – to scale to support the growth of the business IT systems without sacrificing performance or overburdening your enterprise with overhead costs.
• Secure data management – to manage integrations, source system credentials, and monitor the flow of data across the enterprise in a secure way.
• Reusability of pipelines – to create new integrations on the foundation created by previously successful pipelines to speed up development and save you time and money.
• Real-time integration monitoring – to ensure that the data flowing through a data integration is performing as expected, on time, and complete.

Successful enterprise data integration means centralized data that creates the basis for business analytics tools to help your enterprise make smarter, data-driven decisions within its workflows.

Poor Integration Costs More Than Money

Consistent data and systems integration may shape your enterprise’s survivability – offering you a stable source of insights, trends, and new discoveries from your data (mixed with whatever other datasets your company collects or has access to). If you can’t use enterprise data efficiently, you’re going to lose out to a company that does.

Today there are a lot of opportunities to become a true data company through enterprise information integration – from out-of-the-box solutions to tools developed and customized for the needs of your very enterprise. Start your digital transformation journey to get a good overview of your organization and be able to quickly identify issues needing attention with supporting information to make responsive decisions.

And don’t hesitate to involve professionals who know how to make your data work whenever you have any troubles with the complexity of IT system implementations or any questions concerning the enterprise data integration tools and procedures. We can orchestrate your enterprise systems integration to streamline your digital transformation and empower your business with clean and consumable data.