Most businesses use a wide range of tools: ServiceNow, Jira, Salesforce, Workday, and countless others. Each system holds valuable data, but when you want a single view across performance, operations, costs, or customer experience, what’s the best way to bring all that data together to give insights and show opportunities? Factors influencing your decision will include company size, number of tools, reporting frequency, and how quickly new data needs to be shown.
The centralised approach keeps data in one main repository like a data warehouse or ServiceNow. It’s consistent and a single source of truth, but costly in terms of engineering and maintenance. It works well when compliance and control are paramount, and when a single data warehouse is already in place. It may be unsuitable for high volume or time-series data and it might be difficult to add further systems. The centralised approach is the one promoted by ServiceNow - consolidate all relevant data into their platform, underpinning dashboards with large-scale data engineering work.
The federated approach says leave your data where it is and connect to it only when reporting requires it, building reports from multiple sources. This is cheaper to maintain, flexible when adding new systems, and good for real time or time-series data. Yes, there may be data inconsistencies to iron out at the start and performance may rely on some clever caching but we recommend this approach. Why? Because realistically, data in a company will always remain spread across multiple systems, and because we know timeliness in reporting is important. Noone should make decisions based on out-of-date information.
ReportMagic brings this federated approach to life. It connects to your disparate systems - LogicMonitor, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, SalesForce, AutoTask… and as your organisation adds new tools, it can use them too. The relevant data from each system can be displayed in a single report, branded, scheduled and emailed direct to you or your customers. Because you and your team have better things to do than cut and paste.
Of course, there is a hybrid approach where you store important data in one place, but have some other or lower-priority sources elsewhere. And how do you keep those in sync? ConnectMagic. But that’s another story…