The adoption of data integration tools has surged recently as businesses across Australia increasingly recognise their value. According to 2024 market research by IBISWorld, revenue for Australia's data processing and cloud hosting industry is expected to climb 9.3% through the end of 2024-25, reaching $3.8 billion. Data integration has quickly become integral to linking systems, consolidating information, and powering insights for smarter decision-making. So, it begs the question, why would a company ever consider outsourcing this vital function?

As of March 2023, the CSIRO found that 68% of Australian businesses had adopted AI and 23% planned to implement it within 12 months. In December last year, the Australian Government announced a $17 million initiative to help SMEs adopt artificial intelligence (AI). The initiative aims to kickstart Australian SMEs towards leveraging AI's benefits and competitive advantages.

However, adopting AI requires more than just financial backing. The Government's initiative acknowledges this by emphasising that it will support SMEs in adopting AI responsibly and efficiently.

Before 'switching on' AI in your business, you need a clear AI business strategy that aligns adoption with the business goals. Critical to this strategy is a strong focus on data integration. Why? Because AI needs comprehensive and reliable information for it to produce reliable results. (Remember the old saying, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’). The best way to ensure that is to automate data flow between systems and into the AI service. Effectively using AI depends on access to well-organised, clean business information to produce reliable insights. Without consistent data sources, your organisation will struggle to get the results you were hoping for in your AI experimentation.

Cloud adoption has steadily risen in recent years, with many of us experiencing first-hand the flexibility and agility required to accommodate hybrid workforces and changing business needs. Australian enterprises continue investing in cloud computing. A Gartner survey reveals that 62% of Australian CIOs plan to boost their cloud spending this year, with goals to improve operational costs and efficiencies. What are the trends influencing cloud adoption?

Do you know how much data your organisation accumulates every day?

Australian businesses accumulate significant amounts of data across sales, marketing, customer service, social media and finances. According to BCG, the volume of data generated by organisations globally doubled between 2018 and 2021. For too many companies, this data remains stuck in siloed systems and unused for decision-making.

With any modern business, there’s an expectation that customers can interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints (which includes devices and platforms). The cross-platform personalised experience has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a minimum standard. Therefore, all those touchpoints within your business need to have that customer data readily available. But this is often not the case.

Adopting a new customer experience (CX) platform is an opportunity to enhance these customer interactions. But its real potential goes beyond the capabilities of the platform itself. The true value lies in its ability to connect all your existing customer touchpoints and enhance them. Too often, companies will adopt a new CX platform without first considering how it will fit within the current ecosystem, inadvertently creating more work for already busy teams as they work with disconnected platforms.

In this blog, I’ll suggest some key consideration points when adopting a new CX platform and common challenges to avoid.

For your business to adapt (or pivot) as market forces demand, you must be able to change your processes quickly. Your core systems generally stay intact, but how you use those core systems might need adjusting. You may also need to adjust how those systems interact with each other or with external systems.

When it comes to reducing business costs, many people think of it as a cost-cutting exercise. While this approach has validity, it does not always yield the best results; making the wrong cuts could seriously damage your operations and the customer experience. Instead, I encourage you to think about cost reduction as an opportunity to optimise costs. Consider how you can get more from what you already have and find areas to optimise operations to reduce unnecessary costs.

Data integration provides numerous opportunities to reduce expenses across your business while enhancing your operations. It can maximise ROI, eliminate redundant data entry work and provide you with an opportunity to take advantage of cloud platforms.

Rather than grappling with multiple systems, you can reduce costs with a single source of truth for your data, ensuring that you work with accurate, up-to-date information. 

We can describe data integration in multiple ways and apply it to many situations, so let’s begin by looking at a couple of definitions…

You might be familiar with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s concept of ‘thinking fast versus thinking slow’.

Many companies went into survival mode through 2020. They put projects on hold, cut down on expenses, and for many, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) were out of the question. As it becomes safer for companies to open their front doors again, M&As are taking off at an incredible rate. $82.8 billion worth of deal closes occurred in the first half of 2021, exceeding the average of the last five years.