3 min

Data is invaluable to your organization. Everyone agrees on that. But for that data to be of real value to your organization, you must unlock it properly and integrate both data and apps intelligently. Only then can you gain maximum insight, respond optimally to the wishes and needs of customers, accelerate your business and gain maximum benefit. How? Guido Mulder, IBM Solution Advisor, talks about the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration which allows multidisciplinary teams to realize integrations themselves.

In this, different styles and methodologies of integration can be applied where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automated processes ensure that opportunities are identified faster, bottlenecks are detected, APIs are tested and the workload is balanced. This ensures more speed and less cost.

Quickly anticipate

Many organizations have a lot of data, but all that data is stored in separate silos. By combining, integrating, analyzing and presenting all that data using AI, you can make a huge difference. This involves internal data, but certainly also external data. Think of input from suppliers, information from the logistics chain about expected arrival times of shipments and data about how long customers are waiting for their orders. But also weather forecasts or travel advice. All kinds of data can be important. Consider the following: if you, as a (web) store, see a heat wave coming, you can quickly anticipate it. Customers will choose certain products over others, and you can make a better offer. The competitor who comes up with his offer much later will be left behind.

Data in silos

The reverse is also true. Speaking from own experience. A few weeks ago, I reported a claim to my insurer. It wasn’t really a big deal, but the employee I was on the phone with was having a hard time switching between systems. Of course, he apologized, stating that the computer was very slow today. Meanwhile, I had a strong impression that the sluggish PC was not the problem, but the lack of connected systems; different data in different silos. Now I’m not that impatient, but another customer might start looking around to see if other insurers have their systems and data in better order.
If you want to break through all those silos, the first step is process mapping. This allows you to collect and enrich all the relevant data. If you have the process mapping in place, then the next step is to integrate all those sources so that you can take advantage of the data and insights that emerge from it.

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

IBM’s Cloud Pak for Integration is a hybrid open source cloud platform and the ideal tool for bringing all sources together and unlocking them intelligently. That includes legacy applications that are still doing their jobs well and reliably on premise. Those don’t need to be replaced or rebuilt. All you do is put a layer between them and connect them via an API to the Cloud Pak for Integration. This is also where you can safely store every resource imaginable, including applications that still rely heavily on legacy systems. Of course, it’s not always that simple and sometimes requires quite a bit of manual work, but the platform offers an amazing amount of functionality that you can test and deploy step by step, block by block.

AI-driven automation

If you have the integration in place, take the step to AI-driven automation. Essential for a successful digital transformation. By intelligently combining data streams, you ensure speed. For example, you can keep customers informed of information that needs to be processed and shared quickly. Think of a passenger whose flight is delayed. Or, to return to claims handling, if it turns out that my insurance is no longer a good fit or that the premium can be reduced. AI helps to bring all data streams together, optimize them and draw conclusions from them. For example, the moment when salaries are paid is important for an AI-driven system. After all, people then suddenly have more to spend. IBM research shows that solving complex business problems takes half the time when NLP (natural language processing) and AI are used to provide mapping suggestions for integration flows.

This is a submission from SoftwareONE. Through this link you will discover how to get even more out of the cloud and map out the right route.