by Michael McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, Co-Founders of FlatWorld™ Integration
There is little argument that accurate real-time data is required for efficacy at every point in the value chain. However, because data lives in different systems and formats, extracting it is highly problematic using existing technologies. Fl@World™ provides a unique architecture that overcomes traditional data unification limitations, enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data assets.
If you want to analyse your customer’s interactions, for example, there are multiple places their data resides: Excel spreadsheets, emails, Twitter posts, chat conversations, CRM records, the accounting system, shipping records, point-of-sale records and so forth. This highly fragmented customer data is bound within specific, separate applications and processes. Each of the systems will ‘understand’ the data and display the information its own way. What you end up with is multiple vendor-specific data/file formats — data silos — even if the data is about the same customer.
This situation is bad enough if the reader of the information is human. The problem is magnified exponentially if technology tries to deal with these different formats via automation robots or machine learning algorithms; or if your data scientists want to combine these different data sets in some way.
You’d hoped using data would enable you to service your customer better; instead, this data fragmentation problem is costing you time and money.
Your company’s IT department (and/or your data scientists) have to write bespoke code for each of the data sources. Often this generates another off-line database or bespoke file, further proliferating data fragmentation.
Even for fairly straightforward scenarios, the data unification process is time consuming, expensive and prone to error (i.e. if the code has a bug or if the information is old) and does not cover data security issues such as:
if it is encrypted on disk,
who can access this information, and worse
who can change this information.
Existing technology solutions do not address these problems. In fact they force your IT team to write ever increasing lines of code.
Enter Fl@World™ Integration:
Fl@World™ is a unique data integration technology which solves the data unification problem “out-of-the-box.”
Fl@World™ automatically creates a vendor-neutral data view, regardless of the application the data resides in.
Fl@World™ enables non-specialised IT staff or Business Analysts to combine and use data very easily to drive business value.
At the same time Fl@World™ applies bank-level data encryption, regulatory compliance and data access/logging controls without you or your IT team having to write a line of code.
The Fl@World™ benefit is quick, secure data unification — freeing up IT resources, enabling value creation, innovation and agility, while covering off data-security and compliance.