Why consolidate disparate data types?

Every finger on your hand serves a purpose, and although you could use them interchangeably to press a key or push the door, it cannot be denied that you need all of them when doing complex tasks such as typing, playing the piano, or grasping an object tightly. That is because the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts. This is true in the data world as well. You may have specialized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) operational data stores such as Salesforce, Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP), Jira, or others. However, there is greater value in looking at a cross-section of your customers or accounts by bringing all the relevant and crucial pieces together to get the value without drowning in data. A lot of transactional systems may be structured (or at best semi-structured), but a lot of secondary data that is used to augment the core data is unstructured in nature, such as images...