Learn to avoid hazards lurking in your application portfolio, eating your budget and wasting your resources.

Of all the systems and applications you manage, data integration is likely the largest. Few IT departments recognize how pervasive data integration silos truly are. They can severely hinder efficiency, leading to unnecessary costs and resource consumption. The best way to eliminate waste is to identify your mistakes. And then stop making them.

Change your perspective

Most IT organizations manage data integration as individual projects, rather than the shared system it really is. Data integration commonly takes place at so many dispersed interfaces, in so many discretely managed projects, that few application leaders can see the big picture. As a result, discrete integration points swell in number and consume an increasingly large number of resources.

This redundancy inevitably increases pressure on your application teams. Instead of leveraging a centralized data integration process, each team is forced to struggle through its own complex procedures.

“Before you know it, 80 percent of your entire IT budget has been siphoned off to maintenance,” says John Schmidt, vice president of Global Integration Services at Informatica. “And no one has dollars left for strategic development or innovation, when in reality, that’s your whole function.”

Focus on value

Data integration is one of the most important and complex applications within your portfolio. Expect to uncover not only hidden redundancies but also new opportunities to drive savings and value. You will be able to realize significant and measurable benefits from reusable logic and automation by standardizing on strong data integration tools.

Imagine you lead the application integration team for a major financial enterprise. After careful analysis, you discover the company is running 30 separate integration systems, with an annual operating expense of 70 million USD. Many of these systems are performing identical tasks and some are, in fact, doing absolutely nothing.

What if you could collapse those 30 systems down to one and then scale it up to suit enterprise-level demands? “I’ve seen similar situations,” recounts Schmidt. “You could be looking at a 50 percent reduction in operating costs.”

Furthermore, by eliminating inefficiencies and focusing resources on a single system, you should see dramatic improvements in application performance and speed. “In other words,” says Schmidt, “you not only save money, but you get a better data integration system.”

While it’s true that the diversity of data-integration projects makes it challenging to recognize negative impacts, the cumulative effect will eventually become clear. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” Schmidt warns. “Bit by bit, your limited resources are being chewed up. One day, they will be gone.”

Have you uncovered this type of inefficiency and waste in your organization? Consider applying the principles of an Integration Competency Center to help you centralize processes.

To hear how John Schmidt sees application leaders’ driving increasingly more business value, read his posts on Perspectives, the Informatica blog.