<p><b>Using the hub-and-spoke model of a centralized data hub, businesses can easily achieve their real-time data goals.</b></p>

<p>When I speak with clients about their data management architecture — and the accessibility, availability and flow of their business data, both internally and externally —&nbsp;the conversation often turns to data hubs, data lakes, data marts and data warehouses.</p> <p>The problem with this type of discussion is it detracts from the main issue regarding clients’ most prominent data pain point: the lack of real-time accessibility and flow of data among multiple systems in response to business or customer events or transactions.</p> <p>After all, one of the <a href="https://digitally.cognizant.com/dont-declare-premature-victory-for-your-data-transformation-program-codex6905" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cornerstones of a digital business</a> is making data available to those who need it at the right time. Modern businesses are driven by real-time business insights, decisions and reporting.</p> <h4>The real conversation<br> </h4> <p>What we should be talking about is the role an integration data hub can play in addressing most of the real-time data challenges clients experience. That’s because very often, these challenges are the result of using traditional point-to-point batch-mode integration among systems for operational data. The issue with point-to-point integration is that it gets complex quickly: If a company has 10 systems that data needs to be moved or exchanged with, there would be up to 90 bi-directional integration lines, according to the <a href="https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=28713\&amp;seqNum=2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">n (n-1)</a> connection rule.<br> </p> <p>The result: complex and costly IT maintenance, challenges with managing multiple copies of data and databases, security risks, and inconsistent data definitions across the organization. Business agility and innovation also suffer.</p> <h4>From point-to-point to hub-and-spoke</h4> <p>Using an integration data hub, however, businesses can quickly and easily streamline access to operational data from systems of record. A centralized data hub is not a technology per se but a method for sharing and communicating data and connecting core IT systems in a real-time, event-driven, hub-and-spoke pattern instead of the traditional point-to-point integration approach.</p> <p>A data hub enables information sharing by connecting data producers with data consumers. Systems of record publish their data in real-time to the integration data hub so applications can access, consume and use the data in real-time. The hub provides a point of mediation, governance and visibility to how data flows across the enterprise. It defines data-level access, as well as policies on how long the data is kept.</p> <h4>Integration data hubs come to life</h4> <p>Many healthcare, retail and insurance clients have achieved a high degree of success creating an integration data hub. For example, we helped a health payer make claims data from core systems available to upper-stream processes and customer-facing applications within 20 seconds of update or change in status. We also assisted a retail client to provide accurate multi-site inventory updates to its point-of-sale system within 12 seconds.</p> <p>In all of these cases, the integration data hub helped streamline operational data access easily and quickly, publishing data to upper-stream operational systems and historical and analytical ones. Both are important:</p> <ul> <li><b>Upper-stream systems</b> need the data to complete business transactions that cut across multiple IT systems, such as issuing payment for a processed claim or displaying real-time updates to a member portal or app. Both of these capabilities positively impact customer service and satisfaction.<br> <br> </li> <li><b>Analytics platforms</b> use the data to create real-time business insights and reports or to train artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) models. Doing so leads to real-time, data-driven business decisioning and visibility.</li> </ul> <h4>Taking a holistic view</h4> <p>One of the critical mistakes I find clients fall into is thinking of data in isolation of business processes, and as a byproduct of a system rather than the core product. But modernizing IT demands a holistic, outside-in view of how data, applications and businesses interact to deliver value.</p> <p>Real-time, streamlined accessibility of data has become a business necessity; <a href="https://digitally.cognizant.com/dont-declare-premature-victory-for-your-data-transformation-program-codex6905" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">data is valuable when it moves</a>, not at rest. As a result, organizations that best manage their data and how it flows to the right people at the right time — quickly — will emerge highly competitive.</p> <p>A data hub is one of the key solutions organizations need to achieve real-time, event-driven, distributed accessibility of data and realize business advantage from their IT modernization efforts.</p>