How to Harness Application Data and Drive Your Digital Transformation
Across the world, our lives are augmented by software applications, which we continually feed with data. Indeed, it’s by analyzing this data that makes these applications are so successful; they can offer recommendations, provide insight, offer advice, help us learn and more! Our eating habits, our preferred methods of travel, the kinds of music we listen to and so on are all well entrenched within an array of apps.
Similarly, the business world is overruns with CRMs, ERPs, project management tools, HR software, IT applications, all of which absorb and store vast quantities of information. Throughout the organization there are a sprawling number of tools and applications hoarding ever mounting tracts of data.
The Dangers of Siloed Data
The challenge thus becomes harnessing this data explosion and responding at speed to the opportunities it presents. In doing so you can innovate quickly, ensure strategic alignment and drive top line revenue, thus facilitating the delivery of faster, better quality projects that will form the backbone of your digital transformation. By contrast, if your systems are unable to provide the volume, accuracy and quality of data needed to run near real-time analytics, your competitors will get ahead.
The biggest issue facing organizations looking to exploit data is overcoming siloes. If your applications don’t talk to one another, then you have no insight into what is being stored where. There might be duplication, hidden dependencies, governance issues and difficulties running meaningful analysis.
Employees are often forced to make assumptions based on incomplete information and work without knowledge of the bigger picture. Isolated tooling and data leads to fractured organizations and communication issues, with different departments seeing different perspectives and reaching different conclusions.
So Why Would You Want to Add Another Tool?!
It sounds counter-intuitive, but introducing a modelling tool which can integrate with your pre-existing applications is increasingly important, especially if your existing toolchain is already unwieldy and unmanageable. By aggregating the data of disparate applications you run analytics and gain insight through a user-friendly interface.
At Orbus, we’ve developed a range of connectors to help your business reignite its digital transformation. iServer SharePoint Connect and iServer Project Connect are bidirectional Microsoft Flow connectors which integrate your iServer repository – or indeed any tool/system/service available in Microsoft Flow to ensure a constant stream of data.
These connectors bring a range of benefits to your organization, enabling a collaborative environment, enhancing governance and providing you with the ability to respond to changing circumstance with near real-time data and metrics. They support a range of scenarios and provide insight into the impact of change.
Ultimately, this enables you to synchronize and harmonize your data and projects, while at the same time allowing your staff to use the tools that are most suitable for their work. It will facilitate increased innovation, productivity and engagement, as projects are tracked from inception to execution.