Business benefit for IT-mature businesses that have control over their data

According to a survey by Radar Group and iCore Solutions, IT-mature businesses demonstrate a higher level of business benefit than non-mature businesses. These are companies that have a clear data and integration strategy, a joint separate data warehouse and high process maturity.

A mature company can more accurately make decisions based on trends rather than annual or monthly accounts, react to market fluctuations and events, increase customer relevance and identify new revenue streams, and increase internal IT security – to name just a few benefits.

The first key to taking control of the data is to bring IT issues and a CIO into the management team - step two is to find a common language where you visualize business flows together.

To take the first step to a higher degree of maturity

Today, IT is a necessary function for basically all businesses - in everything from collaboration tools such as email and administration, to financial systems, sales tools, logistics management and more. This means that the IT manager or CIO has gained an increasingly important role - who today must be involved in business-critical decisions and be in the management team.

Furthermore, it is necessary that the organization's managers and departments speak the same language. In the same way that the sales department or CEO needs to understand the finance department, all departments also need to understand the IT department. By shifting the language from technology to business, and visualizing processes and opportunities, change can be created.

In order to then continue the work in the long term, the company needs to ensure that the IT strategy is part of the entire business strategy - and not make a distinction between them. The higher the collaboration within the management team - the greater the opportunities for increased business benefit.

The business benefits for mature businesses

1. Fact-based decisions based on trends
   Increased access to data means increased information. A high degree of data and integration maturity means that you can also measure and use this data to see trends in, for example, purchasing behavior, or measure correlation - for example by seeing the connection between reduced sales and increased internal paperwork. Managements that have historically made decisions based on revenue streams from annual accounts are now given completely new opportunities.
2. Increase relevance with customers
   When systems and departments exchange data faster, and more legibly, the opportunity to identify customer behaviors, speed up the buying journey and find new ways to sell increases. Examples here are talking more personally and giving the customer offers on additions to what they have already bought. By increasing relevance with customers, it is also possible to identify new revenue streams, for example browsing history linked to purchasing behaviour.
   Flexibility in structural changes
   A mature data and integration work means increased ability to integrate or divest organizational parts as well as the ability to consolidate existing application flora.
3. Resource efficiency
   A mature and structured way of working also means reduced costs per integration flow between systems, and increases the value of the data that is extracted. Shorter development time of new integrations as well as better overview and monitoring are further advantages.
4. Operational safety
   An integration platform puts a certain format on the data, and can thus identify "wrong" data. Through so-called anomaly management, the system can sound an alarm when unusual changes occur - for example, a ransomware attack. Should intrusions occur, these are limited to one system, as the connection is via the integration platform.

The hidden gems in your data

By cross-referencing data between different systems and departments, a whole new world opens up for understanding the business. It is thus possible to work with analysis, instead of just reporting. Among other things, it is possible to identify bottlenecks within the organization, "dirty" processes, build relationships with customers in other ways that were not previously obvious.

The process is also simple – when databases are connected, autocorrelations between different processes can easily be made. An example of this is comparing profitability with the time it takes from order to cash.