Lessons from 3 Data Integration Projects

Patterns, tradeoffs, and outcomes from actual customer work

February 4, 2026 | 12 PM CT

Leadership needs answers. But when data lives in five different systems that weren't designed to talk to each other, getting those answers means weeks of spreadsheet work and a lot of crossed fingers. We've spent the last few years helping companies work through this problem. This virtual event walks through three of those projects - what each company was dealing with, how we approached it, and where they ended up.

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Unable to attend live? We'll share the recording with everyone registered.

The Cost of Disconnected Systems

You've probably seen some version of this: leadership asks a straightforward question - "How are we tracking against plan?" - and the answer requires pulling exports from four systems, reconciling them manually, and hoping the person who built the original spreadsheet isn't on vacation.

It works until it doesn't. And at a certain scale, it really doesn't.

The companies we work with aren't usually dealing with exotic problems. They're dealing with the accumulated reality of years of growth and systems that were never designed to work together. The question isn't whether to fix it - it's how, and in what order, and what tradeoffs to accept along the way.

Executive team meeting where data-driven decisions depend on connected systems

What We Saw & What We Did

The problems that led companies to reach out for help:

Reporting that took weeks instead of hours
Leadership decisions delayed by data that couldn't be trusted
Manual processes that broke when key people were unavailable
Growth that outpaced the systems meant to support it

The patterns we used:

The right data gathering and analytic solution for the right job
Automating manual data gathering processes and quality control.
The technical and organizational factors that influenced how things went

What we learned:

Short-term project benefits and foundational capabilities
What worked as expected, and what surprised us
The questions worth asking before you start a project like this

Professional working through complex spreadsheet data on laptop while taking manual notes - illustrating the time-consuming reality of disconnected reporting systems

A realistic view of what integration projects look like

Not the clean "before and after" version - the real version, with the decisions and tradeoffs that shaped each project.

Patterns you can apply to your own situation

We'll walk through how we evaluated each company's situation and why we chose the approaches we did. You'll leave with a better sense of what questions to ask about your own systems.

An honest take on timelines and complexity

Integration projects have a reputation for taking longer than expected. We'll talk about why that happens and what we've learned about scoping and sequencing.

Context for conversations with your team

Whether you're trying to build a case internally or evaluate an approach someone's proposed, this will give you a framework for thinking through the options.