Has disappointment has become part and parcel of working life?
There's nothing worse than feeling disappointed. Whether it's your favourite team throwing the big game, your flight getting cancelled before your holiday, or your brand-new clothes arriving in the wrong size - we've all been there.
Unfortunately for business leaders today, disappointment has become part and parcel of working life, with unfit-for-purpose business technology holding back data technologists and leaving the C-suite frustrated.
To make matters worse, expectations for business technology are relatively straightforward: tech tools must be best-of-breed and able to smoothly share information across the organisation. Sounds simple, right?
For many businesses today this is merely a dream that is not meeting the technical reality, as bloated legacy tech and poor integration hampers organisations' business objectives and decision-making.
Even where there are modern, best-of-breed applications, IT staff are struggling to battle the integration backlog, trying to keep the business and its teams as one cohesive unit in the face of constantly changing applications and technology.
This means that rather than getting value from their business data, many organisations are finding it is holding them down, with already overworked IT staff bogged down with performing mundane tasks, connecting workflows, and trying to break down silos within the business.
Ultimately, closing the expectation gap is the most important issue to data technologists today and as such, business leaders must reassess what their organisation needs in order to function as one agile and cohesive modern business.
What your business needs:
- Flow of information
Data integration should not be a key concern of your employees.
Let me explain: when done effectively, data integration should run virtually unnoticed in the background, connecting together data, apps and tools without fuss and prompting new workflows wherever needed.
The fact that integration issues are front of mind for many businesses is therefore a serious problem.
Information transfer should be fundamentally simple - data must get from point A to point B as quickly and easily as possible.
The current reality of manually patching together rapidly increasing numbers of apps and tools one at a time is simply not a sustainable model.
Businesses need true integration technology that can expose APIs and let you create new, powerful workflows for your organisation. Whether it's application integration, APIM or data integration, modern solutions should seamlessly glue together the different parts of your business.
- AI and ML
Turning to new solutions that use advanced technology like AI and ML to help guide business users to connect their data with ease is now absolutely business critical.
With machine learning technology, solutions constantly evolve and adapt for whatever a business needs, allowing for a much more agile organisation, which can rapidly test concepts or experiment with its data and tools knowing that integrations can be done in a matter of days, not weeks.
- Staying agile
With ever-growing market volatility, rising inflation and changing geopolitical events, it is perhaps more important than ever for a business to be responsive to its external environment.
Being able to respond to changing circumstances requires a certain level of agility, but the reality is that business leaders are becoming frustrated by the lack of flex within their tech stacks and the burden of their vast quantities of data.
To make things worse, staff are becoming inflexible as lines of communication are stuck behind data silos and already-pressured IT staff must clean up the chaos.
Businesses need technology that is able to unravel this tangled web of data automatically, with solutions that can directly address the integration backlog whilst also lifting the burden from IT support.
Self-service IT is a great way to do this, allowing the average user to create complex workflows by themselves, whilst still maintaining IT oversight. This means a business can adopt new technologies and make changes where needed without a complete overhaul, a crucial step on the path to truly making use of business data.
Getting the most from company data
In a data-driven economy, a company's data is one of its most valuable assets.
Across the board, business technology is currently failing to live up to its promise, with the gap between expectation and reality growing, business leaders are looking to re-evaluate their technology stacks and organise their tools and data in a more agile manner.
The first step to truly address this is reassessing what the business needs and what solutions are out there to fill these missing links.
Ultimately, to avoid an expectation gap between what technology can provide and what the business wants, it's time to sort out data integration so that your technology, and your staff, can reach their full potential.
This post was sponsored by SnapLogic
