Enterprise data integration is incredibly beneficial and it presents many advantages, but few enterprises ever do it the right way. According to many studies, only about 10% of all enterprises have ever performed data integration, or actively support that integration. This is mostly because data integration takes a lot of time and money, and the short-term benefits are not quite as great as the long-term ones.However, once the integration is complete, this can help enterprises better survey data and decrease costs by need less people and making it easier for workers to go through the enterprise’s information.
This comes especially important in a time where social, search, web analytics and other online and offline harvested data is available. Here a few interesting concepts and benefits of integration your enterprise data:
If you collect image, text and video data from a multitude of users, you are sure to have inconsistent data. The files have different names, formats, specifications and other inconsistent factors. This can lead to a lot of problems, and it can become very difficult to go through this data and get exactly what you need. Even professional IT workers find this hard, meaning you cannot properly use the mass of data you have collected.With data integration, the format and specifications will become much less inconsistent. This enables people to find exactly what they are looking for when they need it, making it easier to use the data you gathered.
If you received 50,000 files, would it be easier to look through one or all 50,000 of them? When you collect data, you will most likely receive redundant information, because people can only have so many answers or preferences.A great example forredundant data is a sales organzation that uses Salesforce, while the customer support division uses Zendesk to answer support questions. Both data pools if not merged can turn out into a nightmare. Salesforce alone has the problem, that different sales reps enter data differentially and therefore duplicate contacts appear.
By performing data integration, you can quickly digest the data you get, allowing you to make effective decisions much quicker than your competition. Not only that, but since all those files take up a lot of memory, this will reduce the amount of computer resources being used, allowing your enterprise to optimize its servers.
3. Less Interface Software
To go through the information, workers need to use interface programs. These tend to take up a lot of memory, requiring more servers and computer resources. Not only that, but more power and electricity is needed, making you spend a lot of money on programs that really shouldn’t be needed.
This is probably not the biggest argument to integrate your data, but with data integration, you eliminate the need for these interface programs, and make it easier for workers to go through the data. Considering the amount of workers most enterprises have, this can help you save hundreds or thousands every month.
4. Fewer Human Resources
Since it is easier for people to search the data you get, data integration allows you to use fewer human workers to interpret that information. Assign IT workers to other projects and use them on resources that matter, which optimize their talents, and it can make it easier for you to reach out and do other things with your enterprise.
5. Lower Risk
Sometimes you need to make quick decisions, but this isn’t practical when you can’t quickly interpret your data. This has lead many enterprise owners, about 80% of them, to make decisions on intuition alone. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. However, when you can quickly interpret data and make good decisions, you drastically reduce your enterprise’s risk.
Data integration for Enterprises:
Data integration is a necessary factor for any enterprise if it wishes to survive. Not only that, but you need a powerful team that can support you during this integration time, ensuring that everything goes well.
If you choose the top companies such as Pervasive Data Integration, SAS Data Integration or others you are choosing development teams that will make the whole process run very smoothly. These companies usually make a data integration seamless and the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages of sitting on different data pools.
Updated: Febr. 10th 2012. 7:37
