Build a Data Integration Strategy

Integrate your data or disintegrate your business.

Table of Contents

INFO~TECH RESEARCH GROUP

Build a Data Integration Strategy

Integrate your data or disintegrate your business.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Enterprise integration (EI) enables execution across the extended organization.

• Enterprise integration (EI) enables seamless execution across the extended organization.
• Enterprise integration is the practice that provides for all communication and data flow throughout the organization, from shared data structures, messages, data movement, and management to real-time service invocation. Integration is pervasive and provides real-time telemetry across the tapestry of enterprise capabilities, delivering reliable, scalable, synchronous, and asynchronous communication on demand.

Wayne L. Cain Principal Research Director, Enterprise Architecture Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This research is designed for:

• Business analysts communicating the need for improved integration of data.
• Data engineers feeling the pain of poor integration from inaccuracies and inefficiencies during the data integration lifecycle.
• Data architects looking to design and facilitate improvements in the holistic data environment.
• Data architects putting high-level architectural design changes into action.

This research will also assist:

• CIOs concerned with the cost, benefits, and overall structure of their organization’s data flow.
• Enterprise architecture trying to understand how improved integration will influence overall organizational architecture deployment.

This research will help you:

• Understand what data integration is, and how it fits into your organization.
• Identify opportunities for leveraging improved integration for data-driven insights.
• Design a loosely coupled integration architecture that is adaptable to changing needs.
• Determine the business needs for integration and design solutions to fill gaps.

This research will help them:

• To fully understand the current data situation and how data flows within the organization.
• Create an understanding of how a mature data architecture affects operations within the enterprise.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• As organizations process more information at faster rates, there is increased pressure for faster and more efficient data integration.
• Data integration has become critical for downstream functions of data management and for business operations to be successful. Misaligned integration patterns restrict the value of data.

Common Obstacle

• A clear understanding of the value of integration is needed to justify business investment focused on integration.
• Evolving business models are growing rapidly, exceeding the investment in data management and integration tools. As a result, there is often a large gap between business demands and IT capabilities.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Create a data-centric integration solution that supports the flow of data through the organization and meets the organization’s requirements for data accuracy, relevance, availability, and timelines.
• Build your data-centric integration practice with a firm foundation in governance and reference architecture: the appropriate technology and resources to ensure that the process are scalable and sustainable.
• The business’ uses of data are constantly evolving and, as a result, the integration processes that ensure data availability must be periodically reviewed and repositioned to continue to align with the business.

Info-Tech Insight

Every IT project requires data integration. Any significant change in the application or database ecosystem requires you to address a data integration problem.

Your data is the foundation of your organization’s knowledge of today and insight for tomorrow

Data should flow and not be constrained by applications.

Data is one of the most important assets in a modern enterprise. Contained within an organization’s data are representations of the customers, the products, and the operational details that make an organization function. Every organization has data, and this data may fully serve the needs of the business today. However, the only constant in the world is change. Changes in addresses, amounts, product details, partners, and more occur at a rapid rate. If your data does not flow, it will quickly become stagnant. Getting up-to-date data to the right place at the right time is what data-centric integration accomplishes.

“Data is the life blood of the organization.”

(Wayne L. Cain, Principal Advisory Director, Info-Tech Research Group, 2020)

Organizations continue to struggle with explosive data growth and complexity

To keep up with increasing business demands, organizations are processing and exchanging more data than ever before.

The most difficult integration problems are caused by semantic divergent data structures and data synchronization across the enterprise. (Database Research Technology Group, n.d.)

80% of data is going to be unstructured by 2025. And 95% of enterprises are prioritizing it from now on. (NowVertical, 2022)

73% of enterprises indicate they are using traditional ETL approach to integrating their data. (TDWI Research, 2021)

Break Down Your Silos

Integrating large volumes of data from varied sources has incredible potential to yield meaningful insights. However, most organizations struggle with curating the right structure for the blending of the information to take place.

Data-centric integration capabilities strive to eliminate operational silos. Once silos have been addressed, the information is available to focus on a given problem. This is often addressed by business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.

Data-centric integration is the solution you need to bring data together to break down data silos

On one hand …

Data has massive potential to bring insight to an organization when combined and analyzed in creative ways.

On the other hand …

It is difficult to bring data together from different sources to generate insights without time distortion.

How can these two ideas be reconciled?

Answer: Info-Tech’s Data Integration Onion Framework summarizes an organization’s data environment at a conceptual level and is used to design a common data-centric environment.

Understand the common challenges of integration to avoid the pains

There are three types of challenges that organizations face when integrating data.

1. Disconnect from the business

   • Poor understanding of the integration problem and requirements leads to the construction of integrations that are ineffective for providing insights. 50% of project rework is attributable to problems with requirements. (Source: Info-Tech Research Group)

2. Lack of strategy

   • Integrating data without understanding the long-term plan results in spaghettification. 36% of IT leaders have no data integration strategy. (Source: IDG survey 2020)

3. Data complexity

   • Data architects and other data professionals are expected to be able to connect data using existing interface to provide at any volume and in any format – all without affecting system performance. 77% of the IT leaders agreed that they had faced internal data quality concerns in their organization. (Source: KPMG)

These challenges lead to organizations building a data architecture and integration environment that is interdependent. (Source: Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Diagnostic, N=602)