In today’s digital age, organisations rely on the ability to understand their growth opportunities and market forces at a glance. They need quick access to a holistic view of their business.
This can be made possible when they have the ability to gather, store, process, analyse and interpret data from a centralised system. From this one source of truth their data can maintain its quality and consistency across the enterprise.
One of the biggest challenges today is for organisations to find the best way to integrate information from all the various disparate sources into one accurate and unified solution. The good news is there are best practices that can be followed to create an accurate single source of the most up-to-date insights.
Common data integration challenges
Every organisation has unique and complex analytical needs, which means it can be quite tricky to make data integration a reality. Some of the many data blending obstacles tend to be:
- aligning existing analytics technology with quality of data sources
- data warehouse and integration compatibility issues
- restricted reporting ability due to non-comprehensive integration approaches
An effective way to overcome these is to match reporting requirements with desired data sources, rather than to specific technologies.
Make IT count
End-to-end data integration processes can take a while before any definable ROI is possible. To speed this up organisations should aim to create a more effective integration strategy that will:
- map the entire data infrastructure
- merge disparate data sources into one unified solution
- create essential dashboards to produce advanced reporting
- implement advanced data analytics functionality
To achieve quick results it first requires a focus on the critical components, which can then be scaled-up as required. The benefits of this approach are:
- ability to test real-time accessibility and functionality
- gaining team buy-in with strong use cases that have been developed before scaling begins
Change is as good as a rest
Centralising data can be a massive undertaking for business operations. That’s why choosing the right BI analytics solution is key for successful data integration. Done right, centralised data can empower end users to abandon legacy systems and gladly accept innovative ones.
Rhino Analytics can help you achieve:
- interactive analysis
- batch ETL
- app analytics
- ad-hoc SQL querying
- reports and dashboards
- ETL Queries
- data lake analytics
Conclusion
Connecting disparate data sources into one holistic solution is easier with the right BI solution. In this way organisations can build their analytics systems around their own unique data needs rather than be restricted by specific technologies.
Shifting focus to prioritise key functionality that can ultimately be scaled-up will help minimise business disruption. Resulting in a clearer view of all data, increased ROI and customer/employee satisfaction.