Mastering Your Integration List: Strategies to Connect Siloed Data

A robust "Integration List" is the roadmap for how your different software systems talk to each other. Without it, your expensive tools are just isolated islands.

The Problem of Data Silos

Your marketing team uses HubSpot, your sales team uses Salesforce, and your finance team uses QuickBooks. If these systems don't integrate, you have no way of knowing how a marketing campaign directly impacts revenue without hours of manual spreadsheet work.

Building Your Integration List

When planning a data warehouse or system architecture, the first step is to create an Integration List. This is a comprehensive audit of:

• Source Systems: Every place data originates.
• Data Types: Structured (SQL) vs. Unstructured (documents, emails).
• Frequency: Real-time, hourly, or daily batch needs.
• Method: API, SFTP, or direct database connection.

ETL vs. ELT Strategies

Traditionally, businesses used ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to clean data before storing it. Today, modern cloud warehouses allow for ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), where raw data is loaded immediately and transformed later. This speeds up integration times and ensures no raw data is lost during clumsy transformations.