The Challenge
Small and medium-sized enterprises often struggle with fragmented data strategies where multiple operational systems and integration layers exist without a unified approach. Many organizations have built disparate systems reactively to solve immediate problems, resulting in database sprawl.
The core issue involves customer data scattered across disconnected repositories. For example, customer contact information might reside in a marketing database while purchase history and lifetime value metrics exist separately in retail systems. Without a centralized "single source of truth," organizations cannot easily access and analyze their valuable data assets.
The Solution
Mature businesses can still implement data-driven strategies by making strategic choices now. The solution involves building data warehouse or data lake infrastructure to activate dormant data assets for growth and efficiency.
Modern addressable advertising relies on using existing people based digital matching technology and networks — an organization can leverage their data to put a hyper targeted advertisement in social media, PPC, or programmatic display. Tools like LiveRamp, HubSpot, Google Ads, and AdRoll enable this capability. Optimizely allows personalized website experiences based on recognized customer segments.
However, success requires foundational work:
- Attaining data quality and customer identity resolution
- Establishing structured data warehouses with designated data stewards
- Creating "golden record" mappings for customer identification
- Engaging organizational leaders to define priority data elements
- Implementing ongoing data management and governance processes
- Defining access points and distribution mechanisms for analytics and applications
Parting Words
Data transformation presents both opportunity and complexity. Organizations embarking on this journey should recognize that decluttering the mess and defining the valuable data silos is half the challenge amid the overwhelming technology options available today.