Bulletin 17 August 2018: Why are we still talking about data integration?

New context, same challenges

Don’t you ever get that feeling of deja vu? I was having coffee with a head of digital technology from a major hotel chain this morning, when the conversation turned to the data integration challenges of digital transformation.

In case you haven’t had this conversation before, it goes something like this: legacy systems is a challenge; programmatic data access (e.g. via APIs) is a good response; but it’s all quite complex isn’t it; and I know a software vendor who is looking to solve the problems caused.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had that conversation. Indeed, right back when I first became an analyst in 1999, we would talk about Extract-Transform-Load, or component-based interfaces and web services; XML was going to change the world, and vendors like Constellar had it all sorted.

It does beg the question: have we really progressed at all? The answer is, yes, of course, we have, but we keep making things even more complicated, in the hope that, at some point, we’ll just supersede all that old stuff. What can possibly go wrong?

Onward, upward, and here’s an article from this week about the UK Government’s Making Tax Digital initiative, because digital’s going to make everything better, isn’t it?

Thanks for reading and all the best, Jon