Measuring Hard
ROI of a No-Code
Data Pipeline
Platform

As both the number of data sources and types of data companies are working with have grown rapidly, having access to reliable and quality data to make data-driven decisions is an ever-increasing challenge.

Line of business teams such as operations, sales, and marketing all need access to data quickly to make better decisions that lead to informed go-to- market strategies. Unfortunately, the data they need is distributed across multiple data silos such as apps, databases, and data lakes. Without the skills or experience to access and prepare all this data, teams and individuals can’t make the best data-driven decisions.

The fact that many organizations have not successfully implemented a company-wide strategy to deliver the right data to the right people in an efficient and timely manner lies at the core of this all too common problem. While some companies have designated data teams to fill this function, not every company has the luxury of being able to build out a dedicated data team. Even if they can, hiring for this team can be very difficult. For those that can’t build out a data team, preparing data for analytics typically falls under the responsibility of core IT. These teams are often already overwhelmed with requests from across the company as well as trying to focus on their main responsibility - building and maintaining the company’s core offering. This leads to a bottleneck in core IT resulting in teams making decisions that are not based on data.

As firms look to build out or launch a dedicated data team to support line of business decision-makers, the lack of access to true talent in the market makes this very challenging. The diverse skill sets required to build and manage the entire data stack is one of the primary causes. This makes these skilled individuals not only very hard to find but also very costly if you can. Below is a table based on LinkedIn data that shows how few candidates there are in the marketplace for certain technical roles compared to the demand.

Without the resources necessary to access and prepare a company’s data for company-wide analytics and reporting, workarounds eventually get created. This typically starts off with a homegrown and inefficient solution for solving one specific data need. Over time as the volume of these ‘one-off’ requests grow, the company ends up with a hacked together reporting system that is unstable, unreliable, and a nightmare to update and manage. As the data consumers’ needs are not met, they usually revert to the most inefficient and error-prone solution - moving and scrubbing data manually.

At a certain point, the company realizes that they need to introduce a company-wide data strategy for clean and reliable analytics and reporting.

A no-code data pipeline platform can empower line-of-business, non-technical, and Citizen Integrator users to build data pipelines to solve this complex problem of reliable data for analytics and reporting. This is achieved by companies creating a single source of truth by centralizing data from all their different data sources to have one unified view of the business. Data warehouses are commonly used for this purpose. In order to build and maintain this single source of truth, companies must connect their data sources with their data warehouse. This is done using a data pipeline platform.

What do we mean by a data pipeline? A data pipeline is an end-to-end process that moves data from one source (database, CRM, SaaS applications, etc) to another (typically a data warehouse, database, internal app, or analytics dashboard). In these data pipelines, data is moved, transformed, cleansed, and prepared for analytics. With the ever growing volumes of data and applications companies are working with, there are myriad ways to build and architect data pipelines. In order to cover all a company's needs and requirements along its entire data journey, a large number of technologies and skill sets will be required. Given the fact that each technology provides different strengths and capabilities, access to a variety of technologies enables you to create data pipelines that are optimized for each individual use case. Bringing these technologies together to build a data pipeline not only takes time, but it also requires very specific domain expertise.

A platform approach that has these capabilities already baked in reduces the amount of work required to build and manage data pipelines. All-in-one platforms are also easier to use as you don’t need to switch between interoperable apps and tools. A platform approach that provides all the technologies needed across a company’s data pipeline as well as the monitoring and orchestration of these pipelines results in a highly effective and impactful data strategy.

In response to this growing platform need, Integrate.io has brought to market the only true no-code pipeline platform that incorporates all the necessary technologies and tools to solve the needs of data teams and citizen integrators.