Digital transformation is delivering a data deluge that most legacy systems and infrastructure are struggling to cope with.
This data deluge brings a wealth of opportunity, but it also brings a whole new set of challenges. With so much information at their disposal, many enterprises have to spend more time, resources, and skilled staff wrangling the data. Overwhelmed, most business processes today are static — and they render ineffective or irrelevant information and/or quickly become obsolete. To become truly data-centric, organizations must take a new approach to information integration and management.
How can enterprises achieve a holistic view of their business?
Historically, organizations have collected all types of data, and retained it in the hope that it will be useful sometime in the future. However, the quantity of information available today has made integrating and extracting insight all of the data an on-going challenge. Consider these industry stats: only 0.5% of data is ever analyzed, just 3% of corporate data meets basic quality standards, and nearly 60% of CIOs don’t think their company can handle big data, according to Bain & Co.
But data is the fuel of the digital enterprise system. McKinsey concluded that a data-driven organization is 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable.
Not surprisingly, these figures closely match the results from a recent survey from OpenText™ and Forrester which concludes that organizations are faced with a major increase in the volume and variety of data they have to handle.
“We’ve moved from an energy crisis to a data crisis”
Forrester’s Henry Peyret concludes that with the increase in the number of data sources, companies are struggling to connect and manage all of their data. Our latest study found that 65% of companies had seen an increase in the number of different applications and interfaces they must manage. This led more than half of the companies to work with an increasing number of partners and suppliers to make sense of this complex data landscape.
Enterprises seeking digital transformation require a new approach
Digital transformation requires a major shift away from the traditional thinking around point-to-point data integration. Empirical evidence suggests that legacy systems and integration techniques can’t deliver the business agility or impact that today’s enterprise requires. With increasingly disparate and often incompatible systems and apps, data leaders must implement a proven digital business integration platform, capable of supporting any system of data integration scenario.
With so many components to enterprise data integration – including Application-to-application (A2A), business to business (B2B), the Internet of Things (IoT), file transfer and API management – a single cohesive strategy and integration infrastructure is essential. This is validated by our study where three-fourth respondents perceive data integration as strategic to the success of digital transformation.
Selecting the proven digital business platform
The study concludes that most of those surveyed prefer a cloud-based integration platform that provides speed, performance and scalability. Crucially, Forrester recommends selecting a proven vendor — one that has been there, done that — and one that will collaborate in executing the integration strategy.
Led by our proven integration Managed Services, OpenText’s digital business integration platform eliminates the cost and complexity of organizations’ in-house data integration services. Crucially, OpenText Business Network solutions take care of all data integration and data management, so organizations can focus on growing their business.
To learn more on how enterprises can speed up their digital transformation efforts, download the OpenText and Forrester study here: Digital Businesses Demand Agile Integration
