Every organization irrespective of industry has several business processes, each business process being supported by several IT products. Each of these IT products have an insurmountable amount of information that can generate insights which are paramount for any organization. Businesses that have been around for a while have obsolete processes and legacy systems that support the same. A typical organization independent of industry has transaction processing systems, CRM systems, ERP, billing and business analytics solutions. Each solution in itself is a silo if not integrated with the rest of the solutions. Granted that each of these solutions harbour valuable information but the the information residing in each system does not generate a holistic view of the business.
Integrating the silos is a Herculean task, or so it may seem, if the solutions are outdated and do not support APIs, plug-ins and adapters. Most CRM, ERP, Marketing automation products, lately are equiped with some form of connector, enabling data blending. If an organization has systems that do not support the above, then it is wise to migrate or upgrade the solutions to versions compatible with data extraction. Migrating legacy systems is a rocky road but the trade off being elimination of data silos. Often the implementation cycle of new software solutions are so long that the idea becomes outdated even before the roll out. Ofcourse there exist solutions with shorter time-to-market, for example data analytics platform that are run on Spark have a faster implementation cycle and are scalable, providing the flexibility that growing businesses need.
It was not long ago that marketing and data analytics borders got blurred due to new business needs. This has resulted in complex technological challenges. Not all businesses have the budget and resources to invest in migrating and upgrading most of the legacy systems. But in order to appease todays demanding customers, data integration is the key. No customer would like to remember or rummage through their homes to find old reciepts or mails when they call the customer care for a service or to complain. They would very much expect that on identifying themselves, the customer care representative not only solves their grievances but also comes up with suggestions to improve their customer lifecycle, which can be only attained by integrating data from disparate systems to gain a 360 degree view of the customer journey. Data integration, thus is a matter of being in business or out.
To start with, businesses should identify each data silo that exists and the function that each of them fulfill. (There maybe exist examples of one business process that is fulfilled by several software solutions. If an organization lacks data governance, then the number of redundant solutions and products can be plenty.) Listing and mapping business processes to softare solutions clarifies the current architecture. The next process is
- To identify the to-be roadmap
- Map solutions that support data blending, to each of the business process
The solutions that are adapted for new age businesses require to embody the following characteristics:
- Easy to implement
- Short implementation time
- Compatability with a wide range of disparate systems
- Easy to implement data security and access rights
- Scalable
- Forward compatible
Businesses need technology that support business gain and growth and the ever changing rules of the game (read disrutption).
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