How to eliminate roadblocks to digital transformation

Editor’s note: This blog is the fourth in our series on data integration. In the first blog, we looked at the importance of placing privacy…

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June 20, 20194 minutes read

How to Eliminate Roadblocks to Digital Transformation
How to Eliminate Roadblocks to Digital Transformation

Editor’s note: This blog is the fourth in our series on data integration. In the first blog, we looked at the importance of placing privacy at the heart of business strategy in a data-driven world. Our second blog covered how to ensure quality data drives your analytics activities. The third examined how you can integrate apps to produce actionable insight. This blog speaks to why partnering with proven technology vendors is a prerequisite when implementing technology along the digital transformation path.

If simply talking about something solved it, then data silos would no longer exist. All organizations have information held in different departments on different systems that either don’t – or can’t – communicate with each other.

The result is duplicate or out-of-date or inaccurate data — either way, this is data we can neither rely upon nor trust. Data that costs us a massive amount of time and money to rectify and rework. Industry estimates suggest over $3 trillion is lost each year due to poor quality data in the US alone. In the era of data-driven decision making, we really need the data feeding our analytics systems to be both harmonized and integrated.

Yet, data silos stubbornly remain a part of business units for most organizations. A recent report from Forrester and OpenText™ found that digital transformation has led to a spike in the number of business applications used for 65% of organizations surveyed. Importantly, the volume and variety of data has also increased sharply for 80% of organizations.

Integration is complex, but must be viewed as strategic

As the amount of applications and data within an organization grow, so does the data-related challenges an organization faces. The Forrester study concludes that organizations of all sizes have “difficulty maintaining compliance with data privacy and security regulations; harmonizing data and ensuring data quality for use with analytical tools; refreshing data in real time; and processing increased data volumes and varieties”.

The fact of the matter is traditional approaches to data integration are no longer suitable for the hyper-connected, digital computing environments of today’s business. Simple point-to-point integrations between applications can, in a few circumstances, do more harm than good. Integration strategies must be able to accommodate increasingly cloud-based and mobile systems.

Cloud-based integration platform delivers tangible impact

As automation increases, the number of systems within a business process that must continuously communicate and share information grows. For example, for an e-commerce transaction to happen, the website has to communicate with applications including sales, CRM, inventory, warehousing, supply chain, financial and accounting. It’s unlikely today that all these disparate systems are on-premise with more and more moving to the Cloud or SaaS delivery models.

Today, companies are beginning to look beyond data integration in isolation. Forrester found that 69% of companies are looking for a more strategic solution that offers both data integration and data management in a single, unified Cloud-based platform – like the  OpenText™ Alloy™ platform.

This type of iPaaS solution can be deployed much faster than legacy EAI and SOA middleware, while reducing development cycles, improving governance, and accelerating digital transformation.

Partnering with tech vendors delivers results

Digital transformation is disrupting every industry and every company must answer the question: How do I set up my organization for a digital transformation? Like the proverbial journey of a thousand miles, it begins with small steps. But where do organizations start and how can they capture value from going digital? McKinsey experts prescribe three key steps that define success along the path to digital transformation and identify culture as the hardest part of the organization to change.

Most companies have recognized the strategic importance of technology integration and are already investing in proven technology. But for this to deliver positive outcomes, organizations must ensure they have seasoned personnel for execution. And just when we think that tech skills shortage cannot get any worse, the latest study from Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO study announces that the problem continues to persist. Such a skill shortage is preventing forward-thinking organizations from keeping up with the pace of change as well as deploying proven technology.

How bad is the talent gap? Only 17% of businesses have the right skills to tackle digital transformation. This is a challenge facing nearly every business these days.

So, how do we alleviate this pervasive issue? Forrester experts recommend partnering with vendors who have been there, done that before, so they can reap tangible results.

Join the webinar

Join the Forrester webinar on June 25 at 11:00am PT to hear more about how to overcome all of these challenges. During the webinar, you’ll learn how you can flawlessly integrate all available data and tackle the complex data management challenges pertaining to digital transformation with a proven technology platform. Register today.

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OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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