Big Data, real-time and predictive analytics present companies with the unparalleled ability to understand consumer behavior and ever-shifting market trends at a relentless pace in order to take advantage of opportunity.
However, organizations are entrenched and governed by silos; data resides across the enterprise in the same way, waiting to be unlocked. Information sits in different applications, on different platforms, fed by internal and external sources. It’s a CIO’s headache when the CEO asks why the organization can’t take advantage of it. According to a recent survey, 54% of organizations state that managing data from various sources is their biggest challenge when attempting to make use of the information for customer analytics.
Master the data, don’t manage it
Integration is now at the top of the food chain as the best way for organizations to get a better handle on the information sitting in disparate databases in order to build a golden source. Other methods have proven both tricky and unwieldy in the face of the Big Data promise. And while Hadoop is the king of the data world right now, and MapReduce and Cassandra are the Queens, they do not resolve the connectivity problems above.
Under lock and key
This is where integration has become key to harnessing Big Data. Much in the same way building an organizational target operating model that shares services and common processes to remove silos, integration does the same for data and applications. Integration helps enterprises share access to common data and remove intensive ETL processes, which can be a bottleneck given the volume and speed challenges that Big Data presents. It is the best way to leverage data from all sources regardless of platform — social, mobile, cloud, or application — and no matter if it’s customer- or enterprise-driven.
This can mean the difference between using information to make real-time decisions, predicting scenarios and proactively managing the risks and impacts, and presenting the consumer with a tailored experience by understanding cross-enterprise data, and not just sub-sets.
Don’t make the business a prisoner through the lack of integration and access to the data.
