Doing an internet search on topics such as “corporate data quality” or “percentage of company data actually analyzed” results in countless surveys and studies regaling the potential goldmine of information sitting on corporate networks that goes untouched.  Further research finds that while company leaders recognize the need to exploit the digital exhaust of their software system and business processes, they bypass the opportunity to analyze this data for decision-making, resorting to instinct and best-guess methods instead.

While cost and company priority tend to be the primary reasons why steps aren’t taken to take advantage of this rich corporate resource, most companies don’t realize or understand the significant cost implications on their businesses for not addressing things like data quality and duplication, process efficiency and accurate decisions.  In 2023, according to various studies and statistics, poor data quality alone costs US businesses as much as $3 Trillion annually and causes up to 40% of business objectives to fail.   These estimates don’t account for the financial impact of inefficient processes or poor business decisions.

So, what steps can business take to harness the data that business applications and processes churn out every day?  It comes down to three primary steps:

1. Integration.  Companies today use a variety of systems to power their diversifying businesses.  Even if a company utilizes an ERP platform, not all functional needs can be addressed by the ERP, causing other specialized or superior solutions to be employed.  Simply put, if these business systems aren’t talking to one another and working in concert, data is being duplicated, processes will require manual bridging steps, and a complete picture of the business is impossible to create without manual heroics.  Integration technologies not only provide a mechanism to bring data together from multiple system, but they can also enable end-to-end processes that span multiple platform, such as accounting, CRM, marketing, HR and more.
2. Consolidation.  If system data remains trapped in the operational databases of individual business systems, a couple of important limitations arise.
   1. Most business system operational databases are not architected to store long-term data and are geared toward transactional performance.  That means maintaining a data archive for trends analysis, audits and historical reporting is required.
   1. Effective decision-making requires a full view of every piece of business that’s facilitated by all critical business systems, whether in real time or historically.  Attempting to tie this data together while it resides in each operational database quickly becomes unmanageable for a variety of reasons.  The solution is to create a central repository of raw cross-platform data into what’s known as a data lake.
3. Transformation.  When bringing data together from multiple sources in its raw state, it’s typically not useful for analysis and reporting due to differing formats, definitions and state.  Transformation applies rules and calculations to both normalize the data from all sources and repurpose it for specific business purposes.  By normalizing the data lake, analysis can be performed across the full spectrum of the business, uncovering trends and patterns that wouldn’t ordinarily be visible.  By repurposing data into targeted data warehouses or marts, groups across the company can have access to the data they need, customized to their requirements. 

Empact IT is ready to help you with your integration needs including:

1. Enterprise data inventory and mapping
2. Platform and data integration planning
3. API development
4. System and data integration consolidation and transformation using our cost effective Matrix for Integration cloud platform.
5. Reporting, dashboarding and analytics using Empact IT’s Matrix for Business platform, or other solutions such as Power BI and Tableau.

For more information, visit us at our website at https://empactit.com/ or get in touch by phone at 1-833-EMPACTIT or email at info@empactit.com.  We’re looking forward to hearing from you!