Like most CIOs, you are faced with many competing requirements and initiatives from your CEO and your board. But you’re still having to tackle more initiatives with fewer dollars. Added to this and a recovering economy, industries like financial services and healthcare have seen reform and new regulations, huge IT initiatives, and mergers and acquisitions, which all add up to massive change for IT.

Handling the crushing weight of some of these technology-related changes can challenge the best CIO. To add insult to injury, CIOs often can’t hire new IT staff required to implement these initiatives and adapt to the numerous changes, because the numbers just don’t add up at the moment. Still, in the midst of all this change and reform, the world’s most progressive companies are adapting, and they have been able to keep their IT costs steady for years.

These progressive CIOs have positioned IT an enabler for business growth and they have proven that time and again through solid IT initiatives and implementations. And the forward-thinking CIOs have had solid successes using integration as a cornerstone to their IT efforts, and have shifted some responsibility for integration to their business colleagues.

Most companies still solve systems integration in the same way they develop their core business applications — using analysis, design, and then handing it over to programmers to develop the solution. The IT solution is tested, bugs are found and sent back to the programmers and then finally deployed. Some CIOs have tried offshore development for their integration efforts — they have their business analysts write requirements and then send those requirements to an offshore company to program, there’s a lot of back and forth, and problems arise around miscommunication / language barriers, etc. In the end, some of these offshore projects have saved neither time nor money. It’s difficult to keep costs steady and quality high when you use these approaches to integration.

Think about this — why not shift some basic systems integration knowledge and tasks to a few of your business folks? This would help free up time for your IT staffers and ensure that these folks understand the basics of integration as they understand the business. You can really save money and time off a project if you get someone who understands the business processes and the data formats, mapping and data conversions. In fact, what if those same business analysts could solve your integration problems WHILE writing new requirements? It is the same level of effort that a business analyst would put into documenting and writing up requirements anyway.

That’s the approach that BridgeGate has taken with integration and how we’ve helped many CIOs with successful integration projects. And with a robust integration platform helping connect your systems and data, you’re on the path to keeping your IT costs steady. That’s a huge deal in this recovering economy.

The Economist magazine recently produced a special report on managing information, and in it, the report outlined the struggle to keep up with loads of information.  The report details how the world produces and holds a stupendously vast amount of digital information which is getting bigger by the minute.

If it’s managed properly, data can be used as a key to unlock new businesses, provide transparency of governments and other entities, and add to scientific ventures.  With more data we have endless possibilities – we can use  the data to spot trends, adjust our business practices, inform populations, prevent disease, combat crime, and so on.  But a huge amount of data also creates big headaches when it comes to capturing, processing, storing, sharing and protecting that information.  And that is just moving the data – changing and running a business based on the information that is “in” the data is even more complicated!

Turning raw data into actionable information is a challenge that some organizations are conquering effectively.   One of the latest trends in healthcare is electronic medical records (EMR).  Digital records should make life easier for doctors, bring down costs for providers and patients and improve the quality of care.  But in aggregate, the data can also be mined (business intelligence applied) to spot unwanted drug interactions, identify the most effective treatments and predict the onset of disease before symptoms emerge.  Stand alone software applications already attempt to do these things, but need to be explicitly programmed for them.  And most software applications need information that is held in other applications, records, databases, transactions to make the best decisions.  In a world of big data, the correlations surface almost by themselves, but data integration is key to making these correlations happen.

Government entities are using big data to fight crime, improve city services and inform the public about various initiatives.  With budgets being slashed during the recession and a new emphasis on transparency, government agencies are looking for a way to use information to become more efficient.  Moreover, providing and sharing information opens up new forms of collaboration between the public and the private sectors.  Data is the driver to help these organizations solve problems quicker.

So with data becoming more abundant, the main problem is no longer finding the information you need, but finding the relevant information you’re looking for.  To be beneficial to one or many, data must be organized, and it must be shared with other people and systems looking for the same data.  Right now your IT staff is concerned about big data, and they have a right to be, given all they have on their collective plate.  Data integration helps solve these issues of relevancy, organization and sharing.   The best integration solutions do all of the work connecting the data for your IT folks, so that your business people who need to use the data can very easily access the data they need and set up workflows that help them pull that data on a regular basis.

If you have questions or comments about how data is getting bigger and how to connect your data or handle it, let us know.  We’d be happy to see if we can help.