Boost Business With A Digital Integration Hub
A DIH supports modern digital services, including analytics, open banking initiatives, and business intelligence (BI) on operational data. It can help drive digital transformation initiatives.
Business and marketing have always been areas wrought with change. One of the main reasons for this is its dependence on customer behavior—one of the most unpredictable, but arguably one of the most important, factors of success in any venture. It used to be that companies would need to sift through sales and other historical data to tweak their strategy according to the current market trends.
Today, with how far technology has come, big data has changed the way the game is played. Almost every aspect of the customer journey is now digital, and engaging with customers through this channel has become a vital step toward business success.
Forward-thinking companies have responded to the call of big data by beefing up their systems to better enable them to manage gathered data. Research by the Business Application Research Research Center shows that over 40% of companies globally use big data analytics, and these companies saw a profit increase of 8% together with a 10% reduction in overall cost.
Marketing and sales teams lead the charge here, with 25% of companies having already integrated big data analytics in marketing and 23%, in sales. To ensure that data management and integration is done appropriately, modern businesses should do the following:
- Streamline the complexity of data and application integration requirements by using a platform that supports modern integration patterns
- Allow developers and IT admins to synchronize and govern data flows by integrating an architecture that will allow systems to respond to events in any latency
- Enable self-service access to data and facilitate its democratization within the organization by using a system that's intuitive and user-friendly
How a Digital Integration Hub Addresses Business Challenges
A digital integration hub (DIH) decouples the application programming interface (API) from the systems of record. This is the main challenge of conventional computing architectures—they are tightly coupled and unable to accommodate gradual modernization strategies of systems of record. A DIH supports modern digital services, including analytics, open banking initiatives, and business intelligence (BI) on operational data.
It can help drive digital transformation initiatives by providing an environment with a decoupled API layer that can support modern online applications. By aggregating data into an in-memory data fabric, a DIH ensures low latency and leverages data integration and analytics to allow for real-time operational reporting. It also provides the following benefits:
- Efficient integration of cloud and on-premise data
- Consistent synchronization of data within applications
- Standardization of data across different applications and disparate systems
- Self-service access to data without the need for developer or IT intervention
- Easy management of new integration points
- Integration governance across multiple systems
Digital Integration Hub Business Use Cases
The data gathered by organizations each day grows at an exponential rate. In order for this data to be useful, organizations must find ways to transform it into actionable insights. Leveraging customer data is one of the most common uses of a DIH, and it's an excellent starting point for businesses that are just beginning to harness the power of big data.
There are a multitude of ways a DIH can help your business use big data to enhance business processes and strategies. For most businesses, putting the customer at the heart of everything they do is almost always the best approach.
Influence customer behavior with the right data
The customer decision making phase is vital to every business because it can lead to either a sale or a lost customer. By using data to identify behavioral patterns, you can guide customers through their journey to conversion.
This data will also help you see what possible next steps customers might take and make adjustments in your advertising or product strategy if necessary. This way you can give customers what they want when they want it.
Predict what customers want
By gathering customer data, you can create customer personas and determine what products a customer wants by looking at others with similar buying and browsing habits. As sales increase and decline, a DIH will help sort the data so you can identify trends.
The recommended products in most ecommerce websites is a great example of this. Because the data can show what products similar shoppers buy together, the chances of upselling recommended products is higher.
Protect your business from operational risks
Now that most transactions are done online, the risk of fraud has become higher. Even an entire business can be compromised if proper security measures aren't in place. Operational risks are more prevalent in financial institutions, but these institutions have since learned that transaction data, even data from attempted security breaches, can be used to prevent such instances.
A DIH can help identify loopholes in your security measures that can be exploited by intruders so you can come up with the necessary preventive measures.
Digital Transformation for All
As more companies realize the value of data and how it's proper processing and usage can make a big difference, the future seems to be a transformative one. Gone are the days when most people thought that big data is only for big enterprises.
Recent trends and developments show that this technology is for everyone, even small businesses. For most, a digital transformation is already in the works; for those still on the fence, there's no better time than now.