Data Integration: Your Guide to Scalable Data

Data is not just nice to have.

There couldn’t be a more accurate statement to describe the evolving role of data analytics.

In our all-digital, multi-channel world, digital business has become an imperative shift. Across teams, data analytics is now a necessary core function to drive business growth. To solve the complex problems organisations face today, leaders need a scalable data strategy to increase business agility.

Pervasive use of data analytics can help teams make smart decisions fast and with more accuracy than ever before, while eliminating blockers that impede collaboration. IT leaders, specifically, are in a unique position to unlock data in ways that transform how teams create and deliver rich experiences for themselves and their customers.

“Think of data as a trusted teammate who proactively tells you when there is a problem, instantly answers your questions, and helps you automate business processes to close the loop from insight to action.” – Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau

Successful IT leaders should view this new frontier of data integration as an opportunity for innovation across their business, from marketing and sales to service and planning and beyond. This playbook shows the power of data to speed up your organisation’s digital transformation. It brings together product capabilities to address how CIOs like you can unlock, analyse, and act on your data to drive growth at every level of their business.

Before we get started, let’s establish a working definition of data integration.

Q. What is data integration?

A. Data integration is a group of technical and business processes used to combine data from disparate sources into meaningful and valuable information. Data may live in different parts of one system, or it may live in multiple systems that are managed by different vendors. Regardless of the original data source, data integration is automated and streamlines the process of requesting and combining data into a unified data set that can be accessed by other applications or systems.

While data is an asset, it is also a challenge for organisations. Data lives everywhere; it is growing exponentially, and pretty much all of your systems generate it. And companies have a lot of systems. The average enterprise has data in over 800 applications, and just 29% of them are connected.

What’s more, it takes 35 applications on average to support just one customer interaction. It is no wonder that nine out of ten IT leaders say that these data silos create business challenges and impact customer experience.

9 of 10 IT leaders say that these data silos create business challenges.

But, unlocking your data can transform your business. By taking the right integration approach, you can extract the full value of your data and apply insights to grow your business.

Q. What is data integration in data analytics?

A. Data integration makes it possible to view live data from multiple sources in one central location for real-time analysis. End users typically access a unified data set through an application interface, such as an analytics dashboard, that helps them understand and use the data to develop actionable insights.

Q. What is ETL data integration?

A. Often, data needs to be reformatted (or “transformed”) in order for it to be combined and used. The term “ETL” stands for “extract, transform, load” —  basically the process of taking data from multiple sources, ensuring that it meets certain requirements, and then loading it into a destination application or interface. For example, let’s say that you want to combine historical data that lives in multiple external databases. In order for that data to be loaded cleanly into your analytics interface, some formatting must be adjusted, such as changing the order of “day/month/year” to “month/day/year.”

Q. How is data integration done?

A. IT teams often integrate data between systems using an integration platform like MuleSoft that provides prebuilt components, such as connectors or templates, established integration patterns, and management tools. However, when a custom solution is needed, data integration APIs provide developers with the most flexibility, as well as simplicity and speed.

When integrating data sets, most organisations default to writing custom code. While this may appear to be the faster solution, relying on point-to-point integrations will create technical debt. Your IT teams will take on more complexity, shifting their focus from innovation to maintenance.

So, what’s the alternative? It’s a standardised way to connect data and applications with reusable, composable APIs designed to perform a specific role, such as unlocking data, composing data into processes, or delivering an experience — API-led integration. With this approach, teams can unlock a data set once and empower others throughout the organisation to use that data in their own experiences, resulting in 3x faster project delivery and a 63% reduction in maintenance costs.

LendingTree built a complete view of their customer, helping them deliver highly personalised experiences.

LendingTree used MuleSoft to integrate customer information housed in multiple systems to give service representatives a holistic picture of their customers, so they could provide more personalised experiences.

Read why unlocking data was a vital step for LendingTree to transform their business.

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Here are the ways to bring API-led integration best practices into your organisation and set your business up for future growth and success.

Start by building APIs that unlock data from all of your systems. Once all of your data is available, create APIs that layer on top of the existing foundation of data to transform it and support end-state use cases. For example, additional APIs can be used to orchestrate your data into functional blocks, such as integrating SAP and Salesforce data into a single block of customer data.

The final layer of APIs will power the experiences you want this data to feed into, such as an analytics platform, a mobile app for customers, or a website for employees.

Data integration can only be successful when data security is a priority, especially when integrating sensitive customer data, financial data, or regulated data categories. Any breach, large or small, will destroy customer trust and deteriorate many of your larger data strategy goals.

Data security starts with eliminating vulnerabilities. Most of this functionality should exist in your integration platform, including mandatory policy configuration, tokenisation, and network edge protection.

You should look to implement layered API security, meaning there is security around the perimeter within which the API is deployed, around the API itself, and on the data at rest and in transit.

Once you deploy a new API, it’s essential to manage it closely. Some common API management best practices include setting alerts, configuring access management, and defining SLA tiers.

Make sure to track API usage in case you need to calibrate data governance and access down the line.

Regardless of how perfectly built your APIs are, issues are bound to arise, and you must resolve them quickly. No matter where you host your APIs or what technologies you run them on, make sure you can monitor them all and assess issues in real time. As your organisation invests in more APIs, having a single place to monitor all your APIs and integrations, and track the health of your entire network, will become increasingly important.

The amount of data that organisations produce continues to grow. To stay competitive and meet evolving customer needs, organisations recognise the need to unlock data to better leverage key insights. But not every integration platform is that same, and it’s not just about connecting data. It’s about doing it the right way, and that starts with an API-led approach to integrating data to drive business success. When you are considering different integration solutions, it’s important to consider how the vendor will help you:

• Get started fast and see immediate value with out-of-the-box connectors and built-in compliance and security
• Build a flexible IT infrastructure that will allow you to continue to innovate and meet the changing needs of your customers
• Design, build, manage, and secure all your integrations, wherever they are deployed, on a single unified platform

Learn more about MuleSoft, the world’s leading integration platform that’s part of the Salesforce Customer 360.

Unlocking your data is the first step. With a complete view of your business, you can empower everyone across your organisation to access and analyse the data needed to make more informed decisions, faster. Data-driven organisations are not only more resilient to change, but more deeply understand their customers.

“Data-driven organisations are “23 times more likely to clearly outperform their competitors in terms of new customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and nine times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty.” – Source: McKinsey, Five Facts: How Customer Analytics Boosts Corporate Performance

However, most organisations struggle to scale analytics and face obstacles across their technology, processes, and people. This can include:

• A lack of data governance
• Disconnected legacy tools
• No commitment to change
• Insufficient data skills

Driving meaningful change and building business resilience requires an approach that combines the right analytics technology with the right data strategy and practices. People need access to the right data and analytics that help them get insights — but without compromising governance or agility. This means moving away from disparate data sources and unsecured analysis in spreadsheets to a modern, visual analytics platform that provides secure access to trusted data with powerful and intuitive capabilities people can use to self-serve wherever they are working.

Here are three ways to adopt a modern data analytics strategy that will help your organisation make better decisions, faster:

People in your organisation already self-serve their analytics needs. They export data for downstream analysis and collaborate via spreadsheet files and email. But this type of siloed, ungoverned analysis can create security risks. The people closest to your business data should be able to ask and answer their own questions, but responsibly — you want self-service without chaos or compromise.

“Almost two-thirds (64%) of enterprises that have been the most successful with analytics projects in the past two years have increased spending on data management and analytics products and services as a result of the pandemic.” – Source: 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, Culture of Success: 451 Research survey highlights the keys to strong data and analytics initiatives

IT plays a critical role in connecting people with the data they need to make informed decisions quickly, while keeping data secure. Modern analytics can enable both the governance that IT requires and the agility that the business demands. With the right integrated platform and approach, your IT team can:

• Implement and manage end-to-end governance that enables, not restricts, data use
• Promote transparency and trust with integrated data management
• Meet and maintain compliance, risk, and policy requirements

Traditional reporting and distribution tools can’t offer the transformative speed to insight or the self-reliance of a modern data approach with interactive, visual analytics. Making real-time decisions with trusted data requires powerful yet intuitive business intelligence (BI) tools and processes that support your employees, regardless of their skill levels.

“Having one fast, agile team is helpful, but having many of them across an enterprise, and enabling them with the right structures, processes, and culture, makes it possible for the entire system to move faster.” – Source: McKinsey, Ready, set, go: Reinventing the organisation for speed in the post-COVID-19-era

To inform your digital strategy and drive better customer experiences across all your lines of business, analytics should keep employees focused on asking critical business questions, not learning code or data software. To help people get insights fast so they can take action while the data is most relevant, IT must:

• Implement and scale analytics that people of all skill levels can easily use
• Lower barriers to more advanced analysis with AI and machine learning
• Remove bottlenecks and eliminate slow, requirements-gathering BI processes

It’s clear that putting data at the centre of conversations can drive change — but this takes more than the right analytics technology platform. Your employees need to adopt analytics widely and develop a data-driven mindset so your organisation can get the most value from your data. Data-leading organisations — those with the most successful data cultures — see the business benefits of data transformation.

“89% of data-leading organisations see improvements to customer retention and acquisition compared to data-adopting entities.” – Source: IDC, InfoBrief: Why You Should Care About Data Culture, sponsored by Tableau

Successful organisations have a deliberate and holistic approach to developing their enterprise-wide analytics practice that aligns data strategy to business outcomes. And a leading analytics vendor will go beyond the technology to partner with IT and your lines of business, helping you to:

• Align your organisational data strategy and success metrics
• Provide valuable data in context, directly in users' workflows
• Foster a culture of data-driven decision-making that encourages innovation

Avaya replaced 12,000 reports with 15 dashboards, empowering data exploration and enhanced forecasting

At Avaya, embedding advanced, self-service analytics has led to an important achievement: data democratisation. Previously, a small team of analysts sent reports to sellers and executives. Now, all roles, technical and non-technical, have the freedom to analyse and explore the data themselves — all on a trusted platform with rigorous role-based governance. Avaya has moved from 'intelligence for the few' to 'intelligence for all' with data and self-service analytics available to anyone with permissions.

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Now that we’ve looked at how modern analytics can help your organisation make better decisions faster, it’s important to recognise that not every BI platform is the same. When evaluating your choices, consider how the platform and technology provider will:

• Support the full cycle of self-service analytics from prep to analysis to sharing, with governance and data management strategy and an agile approach every step of the way
• Offer a broad and deep set of capabilities that make effective analysis accessible to people at all skill levels, encouraging adoption
• Partner with organisations to help them scale their analytics through strategy expertise and proven implementation frameworks that address both technological and people-centric change management

Learn more about Tableau, the modern analytics platform that’s part of the Salesforce Customer 360.

Data doesn't just help you understand what you need to do, it also helps you do it. Once you've analysed your data, it's important to take action on it. When put to work, data can help you turn insights into measurable business outcomes. From completing day-to-day work to developing personalised customer experiences, data can help automate processes big and small. And that means bigger wins for your business.

That’s why it's no surprise that 95% of IT leaders are prioritising process automation right now. When leadership fosters a data-driven culture, teams are better equipped with the resources and time to help each other and drive innovation. Automation is the key that can put a company's digital transformation into overdrive. And of course, that leads to better outcomes for employees and customers alike.

Here are three ways automation can take your company's data from integration to innovation:

Manual processes and small tasks can keep teams from handling bigger, forward-looking issues in your company. Besides eating away at your workforce’s time, they can eat away at morale and productivity. Both could be better spent tackling the larger strategic goals of your organisation. Nearly 75% of IT leaders who've implemented automation have seen time savings equal to at least four hours per 40-hour week.

4 hours of work per week saved by eliminating manual processes

For your service teams, automation can free up agents to focus on 1:1 interactions that provide more value to customers. Your data can also inform bots and other self-service tools that can get customers the help they need at their own convenience.

Beyond helping customers and service agents make deeper connections, automation can help alleviate the increasingly high workloads of IT departments. It’s no secret that in the age of remote work, tech staff carry a much higher burden. Tasked with solving client issues and helping their line-of-business (LOB) teammates function in a work-from-anywhere world, they’re taxed out. Those teammates can tell, too: 58% of them agree that “IT leaders are preoccupied with keeping the lights on.”

To alleviate some of the workload, IT can implement the same strategies for customer service to encourage coworkers and teammates to help themselves. Employee usage data can inform similar self-service experiences and chat bots that can help employees solve common, routine issues, from connectivity concerns to system updates.

Customers can engage with businesses on so many channels these days: from SMS to social media, to a brick-and-mortar location. At each touchpoint, they expect an experience that is connected, personalised, and familiar. Meeting those demands requires easy access to insights to personalise each engagement. For example, many sales reps are finding it difficult to tap into those valuable insights, and thus, that much harder to actually put them into action.

Automating workflow with integrated customer data can help alleviate this friction. Data can allow your teams to get a shared view of your customer's actions and preferences. Those insights can be integrated into workflows on any channel, across any department. This ensures a seamless experience, even when working between digital to physical worlds.

Implementing automated solutions used to mean starting from scratch. But the days of building workflows and bots from the ground up are over. It's time to embrace no-code platforms to focus on what matters: the customer.

See how to increase the speed of work with Einstein Automate.

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Today, IT leaders have access to tested, secure pre-built solutions that can get their company's data to work, fast. Tools like Salesforce's Einstein Automate provide no code and low code automation solutions that can transform the way your teams put data to work. Einstein Automate makes automation with out of-the-box workflows that are built on a powerful platform so you can get started fast, and focus on impact.

And, with a library of over 700 best practices across industries, intelligent solutions for customers and employees are just clicks away.

Those same templates make it far easier for teams to share data in service to their customers. IT leaders can securely integrate data from any source using ready-to-install templates from AppExchange. Ready-made, time tested solutions make it faster to develop personalised customer experiences that can shift and scale as your customers do the same.

Room & Board realised a 2,900% return on investment in its first year using Predictive Intelligence.

Room & Board turned years of customer preference data into intelligent product recommendations and email campaigns. Customers who engaged with Room & Board’s recommendations placed web orders with 40% higher average values than those who didn’t. When customers viewed those recommendations before coming into the store, the average order value shot up 60%.

Read more about how Room & Board is powering recommendations with Predictive Intelligence.

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Having the right customer insights for your teams to act on can empower your organisation to drive meaningful business outcomes, and introducing automation can help teams act faster and more efficiently. Automation will be most effective for your business when you can:

• Enable employees to focus on more strategic work by automating routine tasks
• Put actionable insights into peoples' workflows where they already spend their time
• Leverage no-code solutions and templates for more intelligent starting points

Learn more about Einstein Automate and discover tools and partner solutions to help you boost productivity.

In today’s world, successful CIOs need to quickly build personalised, intelligent, and connected experiences for their customers, partners, and employees.  A clear data strategy is key to empowering your team with the insights they need to move at speed and win in the marketplace. Tools like MuleSoft, Tableau and Einstein Automate can help CIOs integrate all of their data, empower their teams to draw insights to drive better decision making, and build data-driven experiences to power full digital transformation. Companies that adopt a new approach to analytics enable decision-making at speed, and based on data, not opinion. By connecting data across your entire ecosystem of apps and systems, you can build connected, digital experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations.

Check out the resources below to learn more.