It has become very normal for various groups throughout an organization to simply consume and deploy software – and now what has happened is that this software is existing in silos.  Data is input by HR to a master system but an internal event that is meant to invite all employees within a specific division may not be leveraging this same data.  Most likely, the global address book and Active Directory hold yet another story – and on it goes.  Endless requests for data updates and cleanups. 

As time goes on, the data grows – and then one day, almost overnight, there is too much of it, and it is all out of sync and people will say ‘the data is garbage’.  The more manual things get, and the next thing we know, we find ourselves pulling data out of systems into spreadsheets just to ‘fix the data’.  Yet the spreadsheet version will not find its way back in, so now, we have a spreadsheet that is referenced more than the database – until… the spreadsheet data is deemed ‘garbage’ thus spawning yet another data source, to ‘fix’ the spreadsheet which ‘fixes’ a database. 

Once in a while, there has been a big enough of a data calamity or perhaps a loud enough of a person that a point to point integration was built.  Here we do a data dance, only able to sort through the specific data that was integrated.  New fields do not seem to make their way over thereby impeding progress or slowing down internal teams. 

If all of this sounds familiar, then you are part of the bigger movement to get out from all of this using an iPaaS solution to help you sync, harmonize, transform and normalize data across multiple platforms.  iPaaS has given birth to the citizen developer; access to data, access to create workflows – all in a controlled environment.  Lines of Business are enabled to move faster yet they are kept in sync through a centralized connector platform.  It becomes easier for non-technical resources to quickly connect multiple platforms.  Working with multiple data formats such as XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN1), the platform can transform and harmonize the data as it moves from system to system.  This helps to prevent duplicate records and erroneous data.