Data Integration and Interoperability (DII) describes processes related to the movement and consolidation of data within and between data stores, applications and organizations. Integration consolidates data into consistent forms, either physical or virtual. Data Interoperability is the ability for multiple systems to communicate. DII solutions enable basic data management functions on which most organizations depend:

• Data migration and conversion
• Data consolidation into hub or marts
• Integration of vendor packages into an organization's application portfolio
• Data sharing between applications and across organizations
• Distributing data across data stores and data centers
• Archiving data
• Managing data interfaces
• Obtaining and ingesting external data
• Integrating structured and unstructured data
• Providing operational intelligence and management decision support

DII is dependent on these other areas of data management:

• Data Governance: For governing the transformation rules and message structures
• Data Architecture: For designing solutions
• Data Security: For ensuring solutions appropriately protect the security of data, whether it is persistent, virtual, or in motion between applications and organizations
• Metadata: For tracking the technical inventory of data (persistent, virtual, and in motion), the business rules for transforming the data, and the operational history and lineage of the data
• Data Storage and Operations: For managing the physical instantiation of the solutions
• Data Modeling and Design: For designing the data structures including physical persistence in databases, virtual data structures, and messages passing information between applications and organizations

Data Integration and Interoperability is critical to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, as well as Reference Data and Master Data Management, because all of these focus on transforming and integrating data from source systems to consolidated data hubs and from hubs to the target systems where it can be delivered to data consumers, both system and human.

Data Integration and Interoperability is central to the emerging area of Big Data management. Big Data seeks to integrate various types of data, including data structured and stored in databases, unstructured text data in documents or files, other types of unstructured data such as audio, video, and streaming data. This integrated data can be mined, used to develop predictive models, and deployed in operational intelligence activities.