Integration solutions should enable all business users to leverage data for active decision-making. Companies that get this right will find themselves better positioned for digital transformation.
As companies seek to scale their operations to accommodate new ways of doing business post-pandemic, data integration remains top of mind. In 2022 and beyond, the best data integration solutions continue to address scalability, but decision-makers must also make those solutions user-friendly.
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All integration solutions should maintain data quality and integrity. That makes up step zero of investing in new solutions. But companies must look beyond what’s happening right now. The right solutions must be able to handle data volumes in the future as well.
Decision-makers can’t always predict their future needs, so flexibility becomes a key partner to scalability. Composable architectures allow companies to reposition data tools, deactivate or activate solutions as needed, and scale up or down without toppling the entire infrastructure.
See also: Major Integration Challenges of Today and How to Overcome Them
User-friendliness is the new key integration metric
Companies need to democratize their data to take advantage of scale. As the workforce becomes more data-savvy, user-friendly interfaces allow departments besides IT to take ownership of data and make data-driven decisions without having to go through IT for every single query.
Instead of complex new solutions requiring extensive re-training and downtime, the right integration solution should be user-friendly. Dashboards should enable business users to access and view data easily and intuitively. Even better, future solutions should require far less IT expertise to build simple pipelines for business outcomes in departments like marketing.
See also: Cloud Integration: APIs to the Rescue
It’s not enough to maintain quality—though that’s a start
Data quality will always be a concern, but companies must take a forward-thinking approach to data integration. Tools that maintain data quality while also giving companies the flexibility to scale can provide the greatest business value. Even better, solutions should actually enable all business users to leverage data for active decision-making. Companies that get these features right in their data integration choices will find themselves better positioned for digital transformation.
