Why Data Integration is Crucial to Business Intelligence Success
In our recently published report on BI Trends for 2023-24, one of the five focus areas is on data integration, which has always been a crucial aspect of business intelligence (BI) initiatives, and it will grow in importance through 2025.
A recent study by International Data Corporation (IDC) found that fragmented data remains one of the biggest challenges that organizations face today, which is crippling next-generation computing initiatives in BI and AI. This study is consistent with many other findings on data management and integration that were published in the past year.
Nearly 80% of the organizations IDC surveyed had multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, in addition to their legacy systems. IDC found that 79% use more than 100 data sources, and the top 30% use more than 1,000 to conduct digital business. As a result, 37% of data leaders in this study believe that they are in reactive mode — just keeping the lights on when it comes to data management — as opposed to having a clear strategy for digital innovation.
However, organizations that can develop a flexible, future-proof way to integrate any existing data today, and anticipate what needs to be integrated in the coming years, can establish a competitive advantage.
Where to Get Started with Data Integration
BI initiatives should begin with creating well-defined integration processes that not only consolidate data but standardize it for consistency and quality can make it readily available for decision-making. It’s also important to narrow down the data source channels essential for your reporting process. This may consist of stakeholder or departmental information from databases, files, or the web.
Next, identifying the custom KPIs for your organization is imperative in presenting a broad picture of your business growth and losses. And with KPIs set, the next step is to define the format for reporting: visual or textual. Based on your preferences and the input sources, you can select visualization tools including PowerBI, Tableau or spreadsheets to get started.
No doubt, data integration will be an ongoing challenge for organizations, so it is essential to consider the various types of integration tools and platforms you need.
Because every company is different in terms of what technologies you have in-house and how you will need to connect them, HULFT offers a managed BI service and a globally proven data integration platform to leverage as needed.
The majority of HULFT’s customers do not have the staff or the budget to manage a large-scale BI platform, but they have urgent requirements to better understand and measure the performance of their business. HULFT unlocks your essential data that meets IT and regulatory compliance and serves it up in the dashboard format that your business team requires.
Let us know if we can help you with your current BI initiative.