Kapow Katalyst Blog

Is Data Integration really “un-sexy”?

Peter Giblett recently wrote a great post, 7 Key Challenges for Data Integration, in his CIO Community blog that started off saying that Data Integration is often seen as the “un-sexy” part of IT.  But in many respects, I think that view is changing.

The reason IT thinks Data Integration is un-sexy is because it’s de-motivating and usually a waste of time to try solve a problem that is of little importance or is not yet really a problem.

Solving data integration for data sources without knowing when and if they are needed, or even if it will ever be critical to the company, is definitely not very appealing.

The future of data integration has to be much more agile, allowing IT to quickly deliver the right data at the right time to make timely critical business decisions.

This process of creating urgency and relevance for data access and delivery transforms data integration from being un-sexy to, for a lack of a better word, sexy.

It’s a lot more fun to solve data integration problems when the immediate benefits are known than to try to guess the needs of the future.

The definition of “sexy” is a relative term.  What is sexy to one person may not be the same for another.  With Web Data Services, coders and developers will be able to satisfy the time-critical data needs of their business users, and thus have not only a sexy job, but also make Data Integration a sexy part of IT.

So what tools can help IT think Data Integration is sexy?  What tools can deliver agile data access of timely, relevant data that helps the business immediately make better business decisions?

I definitely think Web Data Services is one of those tools.

What do you think?

By:  Stefan Andreasen