Who Owns Data at Your Company?
Analytics and business intelligence technologies are advancing quickly, but the data challenge that most organizations face is not technical one, it’s a lack of access to the right data.
While every company believes data is important, not every company has been able to build a data culture that gives access to every employee to help them make data-informed decisions. A study by IBM found that managers waste 70% of their time trying to find the data, while they only spend 30% of the time analyzing it.
The companies that succeed will create an environment where data is accessible to all employees, and the right tools are available to generate answers. But before you get there, every company goes through three stages of data ownership transition.
What stage of data development are you in?
Every company starts their data journey with IT. Data is a byproduct of technology, and for most companies, all technology-based decisions go through IT.
IT is responsible for architecting and maintaining the organization’s systems to keep applications and infrastructure running smoothly. Until recently, business intelligence and analytics technologies were extremely complicated to use, and managing data required a methodical process with a full technology stack.
By centralizing your data in one place, IT is able to manage every aspect of collecting, cleaning, and storing the data. They are able to control how the data is used with a focus on data quality, integrations, and governance. While these aspects of data management are important, they create a more complex process for people to access data quickly.
IT departments can’t keep up with the demand for business insights.
Data requests are coming in every day from people in every department who needed answers yesterday. CIOs lack the resources to address every request, which means people have to wait. The priorities usually go to the larger strategic initiatives, which makes it almost impossible for IT to help answer the daily tactical questions that employees need.
When data access is centralized, it soon becomes a bottleneck to getting the data you need quickly, and in the digital economy, timely insights are needed every day.
When your CMO has the same technology budget as your CIO, your company has made the shift to making data more accessible outside of IT.
Marketing has evolved from an art to a science, and it is all because of data. In the digital age, the only way marketing can understand their customer’s behavior and improve their digital experience is through analyzing the data collected from the myriad of marketing technologies.
There are now over 5,000 marketing applications generating an enormous amount of data that is completely controlled by the CMO. Historically, marketers needed to work with IT to analyze their customer data, but the proliferation of SaaS and cloud-based tools that provided self-service analytics has created a new level of autonomy.
The marketing technology stack looks as complicated as the traditional BI stack with one very important distinction: all of the technologies within the stack can be managed by non-technical employees.
When marketing gained access to their own data and tools, they quickly evolved into data-informed tacticians. Every decision they make from strategic to tactical is now based on data.
