All right welcome everyone to our talk on why data integration is your road map
to better business decisions my name is stephanie i am a product marketer here at safe software and
i've been here for eight years i've typically done behind the scenes marketing for the world tour
but this is my first year actually presenting it so that's kind of fun later on you're gonna hear
from my sister tiana who has been at safe for 10 years and you've probably seen her present
at a world tour before and she's going to take you through five steps to becoming data driven
and that good boy there over on the right that's joey and he deserves a shout out as well
so data driven this is a concept that you've probably heard a lot about over the last few years
and all it is is a process for making decisions
the process involves collecting and combining data and using that information to extract
insight and patterns that you can use to drive your decision making
a lot of companies and individuals think that they're being data-driven
but data-driven goes beyond simply having and analyzing data just opening google analytics
does not make you data driven i am sorry to say data driven is a complete enterprise strategy
that ensures your business has quality and accessible data later on tiana is going to
give you those five steps involved in developing an enterprise data strategy
but first i want to tell you a personal story about making decisions
so that you can understand why it is so crucial for companies to adopt these strategies
so a few months ago we were in the thick of winter here in vancouver that is a picture
of snow that was shoveled off my driveway and it's one of three piles like three massive piles
our weather was at -11 which for vancouver is extremely cold we are not built for that weather
and my whole family was just tired of it not only were we cold we felt trapped at home by the snow
because spoiler alert vancouverites are not great at driving in the snow
we felt trapped by covid and we were bored we were frustrated and we just wanted a break
so we thought wouldn't it be nice if we took a vacation so we get everyone's opinions on where
we want to go somewhere warm somewhere relaxing some were fun and we decide that hawaii is where
we want to go oh like look at that picture looking looking at that picture i feel better
and we're so excited and we're relieved and we booked tickets for january there's six
of us who want to go i buy a new swimsuit and a new suitcase special nice light one
and for a few weeks we all get to feel really good and now we start noticing the data coming in
the news articles the statistics and all of this information that made us feel less good it was
telling us that now is probably not the best time to travel if we want to make it home in a certain
time frame so lucky for us we were able to get all our money back in the form of travel vouchers but
regardless we wasted some money we wasted time we spent about six hours on hold to
the airline i probably lowered my airbnb rating and we just experienced a lot of disappointment
but this is how humans make decisions whether we are conscious of it or not we
make decisions from an emotional place we decided we wanted to go to hawaii
because we felt cold and tired and frustrated and we wanted to feel warm relaxed and happy
emotions are the biggest driving factor for decision making humans make decisions
because of the way we are feeling or because of the way
we want to feel our instinct is not to make decisions from data
and most people do not realize this which is actually really scary when you think about it
businesses without data strategies are making huge decisions based on opinions speculation
and emotions and sometimes these businesses have hundreds of people they are employing
and thousands of customers relying on them and they're serving them with gut instinct
individuals who are trying to provide for themselves or are providing for their family
are making critical decisions out of the way they feel
and a secret tip from someone in marketing is that we know this we know this about people
and we target our messaging and our images to reflect it like that is how you have ended up
purchasing training you don't use software that doesn't help you or expensive new equipment
and sometimes it works out and your gut instinct was correct and you're happy but if you keep
making decisions that way like eventually you're going to hit a plateau or worse a rapid decline
the best case is that maybe you like lose some money and learn from it but the worst case you
can affect livelihoods you cannot rely on gut instinct emotions and opinions to drive your
decision making and you need to be conscious of the fact that that is your first instinct
so that is the reason why there is such a push for companies to be data-driven companies that
prioritize data collection and data integration have more information available to them that
they can analyze and ensure that they are making the best decisions for their employees and their
customers and that they're making decisions from a place of truth and fact and not opinion
like we have all been to that meeting where it is just a group of people giving their opinion
and nothing gets resolved that is what it looks like when you're not data driven
data driven companies make less unnecessary purchases
they save more money and they also have more opportunity to meet market trends and satisfy
their customers in a way that significantly impacts their revenue data-driven companies
have less turnover because they're hiring the right people and they have a vision for success
and individually people who understand how to deliver value and strategies are
going to be more successful than those who are using their intuition to figure it out
and again like you can be very successful from intuition but imagine where you can go
if you also have the data to support you and now i'm going to pass it over to tiana
who's going to give you five steps your organization can apply to become data driven
okay thanks steph so we know we need to be data driven so now let's talk about the roadmap to get
there which is using data integration if data is inaccessible bad quality or not where it needs to
be then this reduces an organization's ability to operate efficiently and use all available
data to its advantage so this includes five components using best of breed systems blending
data to increase its value data availability collaboration and data integrity and quality
so one use best of breed systems data integration ensures that you're free to
use the best systems applications and formats across every department in your organization
with the power to connect everything and keep disparate systems synchronized you don't have
to worry about being stuck with data silos so consider all the data your company has access to
maps financial information orthophotos any open data portals that might be useful etc
and consider also where the data lives who owns it is it on premises or in the cloud and what
applications and formats is it in so you might have spreadsheets gis pdfs bi tools crm various
databases and more what data do you want to have or do you think you would benefit from having
like location data consumer information a digital twin and how often is data collected or updated
is it old and outdated and do you wish you could update it more often
blend data to increase its value so when you bring all of that data together
you're enhancing it and increasing its value it becomes more understandable informative shareable
and easier to generate insight some examples we often see include adding to a master data
repository ensuring data complies with standards adding location information to a database
adding financial information for more advanced analysis
or performing spatial integrations like texturing 3d models with orthophotos
data availability so availability is about sharing the data with everyone who needs it consider who
needs access to your organization's data and what formats they need in data integration
makes it possible to share data automatically or on demand in whatever format the end user needs
so for example creating an open data portal for the public to access or sending reports
automatically across departments or to clients or making a database available within the company
this makes information transparent and easy to understand and work with
enable collaboration so when you're sharing data across departments and teams this makes
collaboration easier again people can use their best of breed applications and everyone is able
to access the same data sources data integration workflows will help transform the data into the
necessary formats and keep everything synchronized across the organization so this often looks like a
central repository which you can automatically keep up to date as new information arrives
data integrity and quality with any workflow data validation is an important step
so you want to check for compliance with standards check and repair the geometry
the xml or json syntax the schema and whatever else needs to be validated and
that's why fme has so many data validation transformers when building workflows to run
your organization it's straightforward to add important validation steps
and automation is a key part of all of these five components you want to create a system that keeps
applications synchronized and up-to-date automatically distributing data sending
notifications and responding to real-time inputs are often part of being data driven
it's possible to create a fully automated system that gathers new information as it
arrives integrates it into a central repository and distributes it wherever it needs to be
so when your data integration strategy includes these five components you can be confident knowing
that you're data driven with more accessible data easy collaboration better quality data and a
complete picture of all information comes a better understanding of it better decisions can be made
insight can be generated and business intelligence systems can be leveraged
and this is of course the entire point of the fme platform
helping you to integrate and automate data and do everything we just talked about
in particular fme helps you bring the power of spatial data into your decision making
new and updated features in fme 2022 are focused on facilitating collaboration and communication
as well as achieving better quality data and making it easier than ever to generate value
from all of the information that is available to your organization
thank you for listening and we invite you to sign up for the fme accelerator
to have a hands-on lab experience where you can see how fme works