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Need for data integration

By Brian Welsh

With the current financial crisis showing no signs of abatement, economists agree that “We are not going to have an
economic recovery, but an economic ‘reset’.”

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and increasing market pressures, tightening budgets, and economic
uncertainty dictate that organizations re-examine everything - their strategies, operations, budget allocations, and internal
IT processes.

“Cutbacks” is the new word resounding across boardrooms. New pressures are forcing companies to cutback on spending
in every sphere from R&D to sales and maximize the utilization of available resources. And, this trend, which is fast
catching up across industry sectors, does not appear to be a reactive short-term strategy but rather a permanent change
for the better. In their quest to streamline processes and focus on critical business drivers, organizations are increasingly
turning to consolidation and integration of available resources and heightened use of analytics and forecasting.

Most organizations have vast reams of historic data and critical information scattered over different silos, systems, and
formats at any given time. The advancement in technology and data collection methods has led to a further surge in
information, leading to more and more fragmentation of data. Poor integration of such valuable information only invites
costly errors, redundancies and overlaps, and exposes businesses to greater risks and losses. Having a limited view of
the market trends and consumer behavior data makes the execution of marketing decisions a high-risk proposition. So,
you could say that most organizations, with the exception of a few, had up to quite recently been making important
business decisions with blinders on.

A new way of working demands a new way of organizing. The need of the hour is data integration or consolidating and
managing, as part of one large repository, pre-existing as well as current information from multiple sources - across
domains, functions/silos, and industries. Having a robust up-to-date data integration platform that houses all relevant
studies and data - from market sales, equity studies, to consumer data on preferences and needs - will enable decision
makers to quickly access information on a key variable as well as query against existing data from past studies to gain
meaningful insights.

Let’s take one sector, say R&D that deals with new product development, to assess the benefits of data integration. New
product development is often a laborious time-consuming and expensive process involving product engineering and
reengineering that can take weeks to months, and sometimes, years. Be that as it may, new product development, which
accounts for approx. 15 percent to 30 percent of annual sales of some organizations, is the lifeblood of any organization
wanting to remain competitive. And for organizations to maintain their market shares, it is necessary that new product
development be in sync with customers’ changing needs and tastes. To this end, organizations devote huge chunks of
time and budgets to new product development.

Effective data integration could mean the difference between commissioning a year-long study versus a month-long study.
Data integration would help better monitor key variables such as trending patterns and consumer behavior across
geographies, which would alleviate the need to conduct more studies and surveys, bringing about reduced spending on
R&D and minimization of redundancy. What’s more, retrospective analysis of qualitative studies will help draw actionable
insights, enabling organizations to react more fluidly to changing market trends.

To sum it all, data integration or creating a consolidated repository or data warehouse spells - more for less.

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