Why is Data Integration Important?
Written by: Christiana Lee
As businesses seek to scale and grow, they require meaningful data at an increasingly rapid rate in order to make critical business decisions. As many organizations use a variety of data management systems to run their operations, finding a simple method to consolidate meaningful data can be a challenge. This is where data integration comes in.
What is data integration?
The research and consultancy firm Gartner defines the discipline of data integration as “the practices, architectural techniques and tools for achieving the consistent access and delivery of data across the spectrum of data subject areas and data structure types in the enterprise to meet the data consumption requirements of all applications and business processes.” In short, it is the combination of business processes used to consolidate data from a wide variety of sources to translate into meaningful and actionable insights.
How does it work?
Businesses often use a wide range of systems to run their marketing, finance, human resources, and other daily operations. An example of such systems could include SalesForce, Xero, ServiceNow, Google Analytics, and so on, depending on the business and industry. Since each of these systems is different, the process of data integration includes ingesting the data, transforming the data, and packaging it into a data warehouse or lakehouse. Consolidating the data manually demands a large technical effort, often led by a data engineering and analyst team, with the data engineering building and maintaining the data pipeline and the analyst organizing the data in their warehouse.
A data integration solution integrates this large volume of data and allows it to be readily actioned by providing high-quality insights and intelligence to foster effective collaboration. At Artemis, this process is integrated into a seamless user experience that requires little technical effort, thus allowing your business to integrate all relevant data into a single platform without the cost of hiring a data engineer. In a study performed by Fivetran, a data integration firm, it is estimated the average data engineer spends 44% of their time maintaining and fixing broken pipelines. Imagine all the time, money, and resources saved by automating these pipelines, freeing up your engineers for truly value-adding activities.
Why is it important?
With new data coming into the organization every second, data integration presents a wide range of benefits to businesses. The benefits of data integration include:
- High data quality, reducing errors and re-work
- Effective data management practices
- Data visualization provides real-time business analytics and insights
- Increased ROI
- Facilitating omnichannel data management practices
- Seamless and instant data transfer between sources
An effective data integration software such as Artemis allows for the seamless integration of data into your lakehouse, limiting the technical knowledge or coding required to consolidate the data.
You can sign up to get early access to our platform.
Want to learn more about how data integration can benefit your organization? Reach out to us at info@artemisco.ca and a representative will be in touch.