MANAGING INNOVATION: DATA Hidden gems: Metadata reveals where information is buried, but you can leave it undisturbed
THEDATADIGGERS Boomi pioneered the concept of the integration platform as a service... but if you want to bring the data pieces together, you first have to find them, as Chief Technology Officer Mike Kiersey explains How a bank goes about integrating technology systems in order to unify disparate data is pivotal to its digital transformation strategy, since it’s data that drives the modern bank. That can create an enormous burden on IT, having to custom code and manually transfer files containing data that needs to be accessed by different process flows – for example, when creating an omnichannel experience for customers in which both they and staff can access the same information in real time across different channels, such as mobile and desktop. And when staff dealing with those customers need to access different data silos inside the bank. We’ve all experienced the all-too-familiar scenario of an apologetic customer services team playing pass the parcel with a customer because an agent can’t see all the information required to address their
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issue. That’s where an integration platform can help. Mike Kiersey is the chief technology officer for Boomi, which provides drag-and-drop integration and data mapping for a wide range of industries, from transportation to healthcare, education to retail and many more, over its Cloud-hosted, multi-tenanted AtomSphere platform. Legacy layers of technology and related data silos are clearly not unique to financial services; they are a fact of life in any environment that’s gone through progressive digital change. When it comes to financial services, it’s often not the core banking systems that are the problem, says Kiersey. “It’s actually some of the associated services that sit around them. Some of the bigger, established banking organisations have grown up with the Roman road approach: they’ve built on top, on top and
on top of different technologies for point solutions, through multi-generations of technology change. And some of that needs to be dug out to allow a better transformation and ease of accessibility to some of those platforms today.” As a pioneer in integration platforms-as-a-service (iPaaS) – recently also made available as a pay-as-you-use service, AtomSphere Go, on the AWS Marketplace – Boomi is focussed on what might be called data archaeology… helping organisations to find where these priceless nuggets of information lie – exposing them, but not necessarily moving them. “Banks now have data in software-as-a-service-based solutions – they might have their customer relationship management (CRM) system hosted there; on-premise, such as reporting or business applications; and they have legacy. And there are a www.fintechf.com
