Complexity of the company IT environment grows in proportion to the number of various applications implemented in this environment. We know from experience that the architecture covering various integration layers is usually considered very late and their implementation is thus all the more complicated. Usually a first complex “spaghetti” architecture is created (where each system communicates with all the other systems separately) and the requirement for an integration layer is only created once the customer realizes the complexity related to the administration and the issue of adding other systems and services.
The goal of data integration is to set company information technologies in such a manner that they support the entrepreneurial intent of the system operator. It covers ability to transform comprehensive raw data from various applications into usable information with contextual relations between people, products, processes and knowledge, so that it is possible to use it easily across various applications, e.g. for analytical and reporting activities. It is necessary to realize that early planning of the integration can be a large advantage over the competition.