Intuition can play a significant role in making daily life decisions — be it choosing an attire or ordering a meal on a fine Saturday night. But when it comes to making critical business decisions, you must ditch the guesswork and make data-driven choices to maximize the chances of success.
Today’s fast-paced market demands quick decisions made in real-time. For that, it’s necessary to create a culture that’s driven by analytics and insights. Of course, ditching the gut instincts and moving to a data-driven model is easier said than done.
For this initiative, you must have accurate and reliable data at your fingertips. That’s where data mapping comes to the equation. It opens the doors to timely insights for your business. Through data mapping, you can integrate all the disparate data sources and make sense of them.
How does data mapping work?
Data mapping is the process of matching fields from data sources to the target fields in a data repository — typically a data warehouse. Users can create numerous fields to homogenize information. It allows businesses to create and manage a centralized database.
Why is data mapping important?
Data mapping is a preliminary step to design an effective data model to enable data-driven initiatives. It establishes the connections and relationships between data sources and helps align various data sets coming from diverse sources into a single configuration.
With the right data mapping tool, businesses can effectively perform data integration tasks, including conversion, migration, and transformation. Modern organizations dealing with vast data formats, sources, and types can leverage data mapping to streamline their data-driven initiatives.
How data mapping can help your business succeed
Data mapping help break down data silos — one of the biggest obstacles modern businesses face in today’s world. The scattered data in departmental systems serve as a strong barrier to agility and performance. It results in misaligned priorities and ill-informed decision-making.
In addition, data mapping improves data quality. It mitigates the risk of data errors and mismatches. This aspect is equally — if not more — important as making decisions using misrepresented analytics can put businesses down a rabbit hole and set them in the wrong direction.
Selecting the right data mapping tool
Choosing a suitable data mapping solution can set your business up for success. However, efficiently mapping voluminous data requires a heavy lift, so you must get your technique right. Depending on your use case, you can choose from a manual to a fully automated data mapping approach.
Generally, manual data mapping can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. To enable real-time, data-driven decision-making, you must look for an automated data mapping solution that’s robust, scalable, and flexible to match the speed of your business.
What’s more?
Effective data mapping is the step in the right direction to facilitate data integration, analytics, and business intelligence initiatives. But there’s more to it. A business must also learn to translate data into action. For that, you must have access to a robust data integration tool.
There are different types of integration tools, including on-premise and cloud-based data integration tools, that allow you to route data to a workflow, transform it, and load it to the desired destination. With a robust data integration tool, you can efficiently process large volumes of data.
Improved data quality and quick information processing are two key benefits here, resulting in faster time-to-value. Also, users can directly access data without needing the intervention of the IT department and leverage strategic insights from reliable data to gain a competitive advantage.
The takeaway
Data mapping is a crucial step to unlock critical business insights in data analytics and business intelligence. A unified platform with data integration and mapping capabilities can streamline data points and help gather insight-rich data to support informed and timely decision-making.