Data Silos to Automated Insights : Uncover Marketing Potential

“72% percent of the firms find managing multiple CRM systems across geographies or technology silos moderately to extremely challenging” – Forrester

Amid market evolution, technological advancement and rising customer aspirations, the only way a company can keep thriving is through ‘Data’. Data, without a doubt, has become the most powerful business resource around the globe today. Keeping up with the demand, the number of tools available for data collection and analysis continue to soar, but so does the frequency of data silos.

Most enterprise decisions are sensitive to data flux, such as customer’s online activity, point of sale transactions, and latest trends. They need a precise, timely and sophisticated analysis at their disposal to make sense of consumer’s behaviour. Therefore, everyday more and more enterprises are taking steps towards a data-driven strategy.

Most businesses’ mistakenly try to rub off insights from data silos, leading to inaccurate and incomplete insights. Whereas, some stalwarts who do understand the importance of rupturing data silos and making a centralised enterprise-wide data pool before analysing, find fetching/downloading and integrating tons of data manually – tedious and time-consuming. Overall, the problem with data silos spewing false insights remains unsolved.

“The data, which you have been looking for to back up your next big-it decision is out there — if only you knew how to access it”

Data Silo ?

A data silo is simply a data store that is not easily accessible to anyone other than the ones who create, maintain or own it. In essence, data exists across different enterprise units, organizational functions, and CRM systems; but is not accessible readily to everyone in the enterprise. Data silos can be birthed by several phenomenon, such as mergers/acquisitions, multi-layered management, stringent departmental data policies, aggressive independent work culture, lack of proper data sharing processes, inefficient technical interoperability among datasets, etc.

Through this bitesize blog, we will take you and your firm from data silos to automated insights, step by step.

Step 1 – Central Repository

Data remains siloed as long as it is disconnected. Therefore, the very first step is to connect the data from multiple data silos/sources and store it at a centralised repository. Fetching & Integrating data sources spread across varied technologies and geographies is done using the ETL process (extract, transform and load).

Though the power of business analytics in decision making is a common knowledge now, yet most of it remains just talk. The reason is old and simple – Absence of clean data.
There is a hefty preparation cost associated with data. Acquiring and preparing data eats up almost 80% of the total time that goes into analytics. Although the ETL process can be carried out by in-house experts as well, yet handing over to experts is considered as a best-practise.

DataChannel is a completely self-serve no-code SaaS platform used for Data Aggregation, Analytics and Visualization. It can carry out ETL from hundreds of different data sources/silos, at a user defined frequency and integrate them into a harmonious normalized form, ready for further analytics.

Step 2 – Visualize & Analyse

The next step involves real-time analytics and visualizations of this integrated data. Preparing reports, charts, graphs, etc manually from data silos across the organisation can be a daunting task, and is easily prone to human error. This problem can be easily solved using an advanced business intelligence (BI) tool for visualization. All you need is a homogeneous and normalised data repository. DataChannel can help you here, by letting you visualise the integrated data using the tool of your choice. You can also use the in-built dashboard as well.

Conclusion

Data silos can happen even to the most careful and the very best of the organisations out there. In fact, It’s never too early to ask yourself – “How is my company addressing the issue of data silos”? Collection of the right data was your job, but making it useful for you requires an altogether different skill set. When talking about data silos, the sooner the better is always the preferred answer. Start your journey with DataChannel today and get access to cost-effective, scalable, fully-automated & zero-code platform.

DataChannel – An integrated ETL & Reverse ETL solution

• 100+ Data Sources. DataChannel’s ever-expanding list of supported data sources includes all popular advertising, marketing, CRM, financial, and eCommerce platforms and apps along with support for ad-hoc files, google sheets, cloud storages, relational databases, and ingestion of real-time data using webhooks. If we do not have the integration you need, reach out to our team and we will build it for you for free.
• Powerful scheduling and orchestration features with granular control over scheduling down to the exact minute.
• Granular control over what data to move. Unlike most tools which are highly opinionated and dictate what data they would move, we allow you the ability to choose down to field level what data you need. If you need to add another dimension or metric down the line, our easy to use UI lets you do that in a single click without any breaking changes to your downstream process.
• Extensive Logging, fault tolerance and automated recovery allows for dependable and reliable pipelines. If we are unable to recover, the extensive notifications will alert you via slack, app and email for taking appropriate action.
• Built to scale at an affordable cost. Our best in class platform is built with all ETL best practices built to handle billions of rows of data and will scale with your business when you need them to, while allowing you to only pay for what you use today.
• Get started in minutes. Get started in minutes with our self-serve UI or with the help of our on-boarding experts who can guide you through the process. We provide extensive documentation support and content to guide you all the way.
• Managed Data Warehouse. While cloud data warehouses offer immense flexibility and opportunity, managing them can be a hassle without the right team and resources. If you do not want the trouble of managing them in-house, use our managed warehouse offering and get started today. Whenever you feel you are ready to do it in-house, simply configure your own warehouse and direct pipelines to it.
• Activate your data with Reverse ETL. Be future-ready and don’t let your data sit idle in the data warehouse or stay limited to your BI dashboards. The unidimensional approach toward data management is now undergoing a paradigm change. Instead, use DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.