Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

Understanding Social Personas

In which Jill reveals her secret. (Okay, one of her secrets.)

There are some things that only a few good friends know about me. For instance, I like running on the beach. I watch Animal Planet religiously. I enjoy napping in the back of the station wagon, even when it’s parked in the garage. And—I’m not proud of this, but here it goes—on occasion I eat my own poop. The secret is this:  I’m really a dog. And I have 800 Twitter followers.

Don’t go looking for these factoids at www.twitter.com/jilldyche. That’s someone else. Or IS it?

You see, when I started using Twitter I had to reconcile different areas of my life. I like to tweet about professional stuff, including customer relationship management (CRM), social media, and information as a strategic enabler. I also like to chat and share info with my non-work friends, many of whom are hiking buddies, dog rescue advocates, or fellow charity volunteers. Sometimes my work tweeps aren’t necessarily aligned with all my goodwill activities, nor do they always care about my doggie sagas. (Amy is blind, Lu is 14 with vestibular disease, and Colby has epilepsy.)  Likewise my non-work buddies think MDM is simply the acronym for the new slogan, “Mutt Dogs Matter!”

Since Colby comes the closest of my three dogs to having opposable thumbs, I set her up on Twitter. And thus I adopted a new social persona that lets me communicate with a subset of my friends in a more meaningful way, without bothering the rest with humdrum observations or irrelevant news.

[Hiking and dog buddies: go ahead and skip the following paragraph.]

Sound familiar? The definition of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the ability to differentiate customers in order to distinguish their treatment. That applies to our sales force, our customer service reps, and yes, to marketing. Why e-mail a customer a discount code for a product he already has? Why ship a catalog aimed at newly-marrieds to a single grandmother? Why pitch cat food to… You get the idea.

Your social persona means more than just having the answer to “Which Superhero are you?” or “Which Barbie are you?” (No, I’m not kidding.) It represents a circumscribed collection of behaviors and preferences, not necessarily your entire set of behaviors and preferences. Social personas—alright work friends, personae—encompass similar attributes and are more narrowly defined. Our social personas help us refine our networks, participate in new on-line communities, and invite fresh collaborations. Social personas essentially allow customers to segment themselves. And they’ll segment themselves in a far more accurate and nuanced way than a marketing department ever could. The implications on sales uplift and return on marketing investment could be staggering.

Indeed some savvy companies have discovered Colby, and are pitching her products according to who she is and what she, er, says. Colby buys bully sticks from Value Pet Supplies (@valuepet); attends fundraisers on behalf of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary (@BFAS); browses the aisles of Red Barn (@redbarnfeed); and has even been known to watch Vet TV (@veterinarytelevision). Colby is a Coonhound, but she’s also a consumer. Those with a stake in the $45 billion pet care industry are cultivating relationships with her.

[Hikers and dog friends: go straight to the end.]

This adds a new wrinkle to social CRM, especially to the already challenging practice of customer segmentation. Most companies still struggle to transcend the well-worn practice of demographic segmentation, seeking to enrich and integrate their customer data to enable more sophisticated behavioral, preference, and usage-based segmentation and with them more intelligent ways to engage and interact with customers and prospects. Persona-based segmentation should be next on their lists.

The hard part of social personas, of course, is establishing the connections between social identities. The very hard part is collecting and structuring that data, then integrating it with the rest of the customer’s profile in a sustainable way.  One could argue that companies have yet to accomplish this successfully with their on-premise structured data, never mind social media data.  But the time to start planning is now.

Among Colby’s followers are @BuckBasset, @Otis_the_Pug, @WinterKitten, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger (@Schwarzenegger). You can follow Colby on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Colby_the_Dog. She’ll follow you back just as soon as she finishes her bully stick.

Charm School: It’s Not Just for IT Anymore

In which Jill reminds the business that it’s their business, too.

In 2008 Business Week reported that Kimberly-Clark had run a charm school for its pared-down IT workforce. The consumer packaged goods giant had recently outsourced almost 80 percent of its technology staff, and there were high expectations for the survivors. Improving communications with the business constituency was a priority. Hence the techie finishing school.

There’s a great Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert asks a user for his business requirements. The user suggest that instead Dilbert just build the system, “and then I’ll tell your boss that it doesn’t meet my needs.” Welcome to a new era of shared accountability where the business is—or at least, should be—as much on the hook for IT project success as IT is.

As we’ve formalized business requirements gathering processes and even adopted new tools to help us automate them, business users can no longer simply finger-wag at IT. They’ve got skin in the game, too. As much as they’d prefer to call someone to run some numbers, or rattle of a wish list in a status meeting, business stakeholders need formal rules of engagement just as much as their IT brethren. Likewise, IT managers can’t simply rely on the overblown promises of iterative prototyping to draw users in, or depend on their trusty enterprise app vendor to prescribe a solution in a vacuum. Mutual accountability is the new black.

The diagram below illustrates an example of a sustained hand-off cycle between IT and the business at one of our clients:

In essence, this was the unified gameplan that had been missing. In this new world, the business can’t enlist IT until they’ve done their own homework. This means thoroughly defining the initiative—here, ensuring that it’s aligned to strategy and a complete business case is developed—before engaging IT and entering the development pipeline. Note that each of the numbered steps represents its own process or set of processes. (IT people will enjoy the divine justice that there are more steps on the business side.)

Business stakeholders need to not only adopt their own processes for defining and justifying initiatives, but they have to articulate their expectations clearly and stay actively involved in delivery. The days of the IT-business mind-meld when technology staff relied on gut-feel, personal relationships, and so much storytelling to arrive at the right technology solution are over. So are the days of what blogger Xavier Noemann calls the “Kramden-esque hamana hamana” of user-speak. The fact is business users have to step up, articulate their desired outcomes, and work with IT. And maybe they can start being nicer to each other, charm school be damned!

photo by Bogdix via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Ode to Initiate Systems

In which Jill pays homage to a class act.

The rumors of IBM’s acquisition of MDM vendor Initiate Systems were confirmed yesterday in an IBM press release.  Herewith, a brief homage.

A few years ago Initiate Chief Scientist Scott Schumacher dropped by our L.A. offices to introduce his fledgling company and to share some MDM successes. If you don’t know Scott, this is like saying that Robert Deniro showed up to block a couple scenes, or that Jimmy Page needed to borrow your guitar to try out a new riff. Needless to say, I took notes.

Upon learning of our forthcoming book on CDI, Initiate referred Evan and me to several of its customers. One was Marty Moseley, at the time Intuit’s Chief Architect. These were the days when people still couldn’t articulate the difference between an MDM hub and a data warehouse. I asked Marty how he made the internal pitch for MDM at Intuit, and his answer was refreshingly plainspoken: “We have SOA here at Intuit. It helps us make sure that our systems do what they’re good at. Why would I use my data warehouse to do MDM? That’s like saying SAP can do everything. We needed to operationally integrate our customer data. So we bought a hub.” Marty went on to become Initiate’s CTO and a good friend.

Where other vendors hoard contacts and micro-manage their messaging, Initiate made transparency part of its culture. When our book was published CEO Bill Conroy personally offered his support and that of his management staff, and would follow up with personal notes of congratulation and regular company updates. Bill knows how to build a good management team too, and Gina Sandon and her marketing team fell over backwards to provide me with industry research. Ian Stahl, Andrea Zivalich, Michelle Woolfolk, Rick Clements, Jim Cushman, Lorraine Fernandes, and Greg Shaw have all been similarly supportive and impressive.

In addition to being an acknowledged leader in healthcare (most notably, master patient index) and government (person-of-interest recognition), Initiate has blazed a trail across a range of industries, geographies, and value propositions. Its matching algorithm is arguably second-to-none, it led the way in defining the concept of exchanges, and its data governance and stewardship offerings were first out of the gate.

Initiate’s acquisition means that its new parent company can now make good on those Sunday-morning network commercials that flaunt its leadership in health care and information integration. I do predict that Initiate will be more difficult to absorb into IBM than its rival Siperian will with Informatica. I’ve spoken to two Initiate Customer Advisory Board gatherings and the consensus among heavy-hitter customers is that they invested in Initiate precisely because it wasn’t a one of the big enterprise app vendors.

In the dark of night most owners of MDM programs will admit that they ultimately chose their MDM solution because the vendor was already incumbent, or because the incumbent vendor was willing to provide a steep discount (read, free) in exchange for a reference. But Initiate customers tell a different story. “We bought Initiate because of [insert Initiate employee name here]. And because they weren’t [insert large vendor name here].”

Don’t eff it up, IBM.

The Good News about MDM Market Consolidation

In which Jill stays high on MDM.

I usually root for the little guy, so when I first heard the rumor that there were multiple bidders for Siperian, I figured that SAP would take it home and that it really was a three-vendor world. With revenues passing the half-billion mark, it seems that Informatica is joining the ranks of the big guys after all.

I agree with those in the analyst community who say that Informatica’s purchase of Siperian will be good for both companies. (Check out great posts from Rob Karel and Merv Adrian.) Last year, Informatica’s MDM story verged on the schizophrenic as the company simultaneously advocated a “roll your own” approach to MDM using various software components while at the same time making investments in both Siperian and rival Initiate Systems.

Siperian fills in some significant voids in Informatica’s MDM capabilities, most notably hierarchy management and transaction integration—updating the golden record in real time. While Informatica supports message-based data passing in real time, with Siperian, real-time data requests will soon be a reality. In return, Siperian will now have the power of the Informatica sales force and a new set of prospects in the data integration company’s fiercely loyal customer base.

When Evan and I were writing our book on Customer Data Integration and MDM, we knew we had to write about “the stack” and we knew—despite comprehensive chapters on data governance, data quality, and implementation methodologies—a lot of text would smack of back-office infrastructure. Let’s be honest. Companies that invested in software from Purisma (before D&B acquired them) and Stratature (before they were snapped up by Microsoft) were early adopters. IT organizations that bought these toolsets were laser-focused on narrow, yet high-impact, business problems, and were willing to invest in targeted solutions from smaller niche players.

So we wrote a chapter on making the business case in which we presented a litany of industry-specific MDM value propositions. The truth is that MDM is a business solution, and vendors should sell it accordingly.

Whether you’re tackling state reporting compliance in the pharmaceutical industry, account consolidation in banking, master patient index in healthcare, channel obliteration in retail—the lists go on and on—MDM can solve the problem more quickly and effectively than custom code. Or—as now Informatica would admit—than an ETL tool. As Siperian’s multiple pharmaceutical customers will attest, the ROI for MDM is in the industry business problem.

Informatica CMO Chris Boorman’s spirits were high when I talked to him on Friday. “We’ve thought a lot about MDM as a key piece of our overall data integration strategy,” he said. “And we’ve embraced Siperian’s concept of a ‘trust framework,’ for data. The ability to assign a confidence level to data is a differentiator.”

My confidence level that other MDM acquisitions are on the horizon? High.

Photo by Sreejith K via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

The Quality Gap: Why Being On-Time Isn’t Enough

In which Jill advocates behavior changes, starting at the top. But not for you. No, you’re fine. Just for other people.

The biggest problem in business today is that everything is date-driven and not quality-driven.

There, I’ve said it. And a few dozen of my past and current clients are now sidling up to their laptops to shoot me an e-mail asking me if this blog is about them. (The answer is Yes It Is And You Know Who You Are.) Seriously, this is a problem everywhere, yet despite the wholesale crises it precipitates it’s actually getting worse.The root cause of this problem is the old bugaboo of perception. “Progress” is usually measured by speed-of-delivery, not fitness-for-purpose or conformance to requirements or streamlined processes or any of those other quality maxims. We’ve all heard a variation of the following:

“Just [complete the work] so I can get it into my status report for this [week/month/year].”

So that project manager’s boss is now satisfied that the team is getting things done instead of abusing flex time or work-from-home policies. Meantime the campaign went to a saturated segment. Product prices no longer match across divisions. Account managers are confused about territory assignments and are cannibalizing sales. And the Feds have just left a message for your CFO.

You have to name it to claim it. (I learned this from watching The Biggest Loser the other night.) So herewith, the five main reasons for this phenomenon:

1: The measurement conversation isn’t baked into project initiation. In our BI, MDM, and data governance projects we make sure that this is part of the requirements phase. But practitioners aren’t the only people who need to have this conversation. Business executives and managers should be proactive about their quality criteria during ideation or (at the latest) in the business case. This not only elucidates delivery steps, it makes scoping so much easier.

2: The “effort delusion”, that anachronistic WASP-y assumption that many people working hard will yield positive results. There’s a monkeys-on-an-island analogy here that I’ll refrain from making. But as many before me have aptly observed working hard simply isn’t enough.

3: No one closes the loop. Imagine how many companies have invested in quality programs, data quality automation, business analysis skills, TQM and SixSigma training and other improvements yet continue to fail to reconcile the project’s original objectives from its delivered outcome. Instead, projects endure scope creep or are delivered as a shadow of their original vision. Closing the loop between original vision and ultimate deliverable is a learned and practiced behavior. Instead, mediocre projects drive a flurry of fix-and-maintain activities that would have been unnecessary had they been delivered right the first time, and ultimately far more costly.

4: Failure to define realistic delivery increments. This is Project Management 101. Or is it? The problem here is that the people doing the scoping are often not those on the hook to deliver the goods. I’ve seen project managers idling in the doorways asking programmers to rattle off their tasks, then randomly assigning time-to-completion. It doesn’t work that way. Or it shouldn’t.

5: The economic climate has made people paranoid. There, I’ve said it. And a few dozen of my past and current clients…oh, nevermind. You’ve seen it yourself. People go into delivery hyperdrive and start producing at all costs. (“Just load the data into the database—we’ll worry about whether it’s usable later.”) Worse, they cover their collective asses while spinning stories of their productivity, backing into post-facto project plans and pointing fingers when people ask questions.

Maybe if we understand the root causes, we can fix the problem. (Thanks for that one too, Bob and Jillian!)  Or maybe we’ll just stay on the couch and keep chomping away, occasionally groping for the remote control so we can get something different just by pressing a button.

Could Data Governance Help the War on Terror?

In which Jill wags her finger at the silos—ours, theirs, and yours.

“Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list."
-- President Barack Obama

President Obama addressed the Christmas day terror attempt in his White House briefing this afternoon. He acknowledged that the U.S. government had botched terrorist tracking and that the system had failed. He admitted that each agency took responsibility for its own stuff. He also confessed that there was a lack of information sharing, that various government agencies had failed to pull it together. The subtext was that current practices and the best of intentions aren’t enough when it comes to the war on terror.

Obama sounds like a lot of corporate executives I’ve met. They admit that the individual departments are working hard and may be meeting their individual goals. But then something stupid happens. The company loses its largest account or a competitor beats them to the punch on a new product. The hard fact emerges that the company could have used its information better. And that siloed organizations beget siloed data.

The alleged terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, had been in Nigeria, Yemen, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands before flying to the U.S. Each of these governments had a slice of information about him. The UK had enough information to put him on a watch list. But the information was never integrated into a rich enough profile of Abdul Mutallab for the FBI to mark him as a person of interest. As Informatica marketing vice president Chris Boorman wrote in his excellent blog post, this would have been an apt use of identity resolution software. Various government agencies could have matched partial information to form a holistic view of Abdul Mutallab, one that could have been shared, thus pinpointing him as a suspect. With the right collaboration, this could happen at both federal and international levels.

There are over a million names on the U.S. terrorist watch list, and in fact the intelligence community had information that an attack on the U.S. might be imminent. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted that since apprehending Abdul Mutallab, they had gleaned “usable, actionable intelligence” from him. Given their track record, you can’t help but wonder how American intelligence agencies will use this information. 

“It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” Obama conceded. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” As much as you believe him, you’ve got to wonder what he intends to do. Sure, he inherited a bunch of crap, but it’s crap we hired, er, elected him to fix.

The conversation in the press has been the same conversation that occurs in corporate conference rooms across the world after a major screw-up: “Who did the oversight?” and “Who should get fired?” “Growing questions about if and when heads will roll!” trumpeted CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. In a crisis, attention seems to shift to the people issues.

Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the real conversation should be how to move forward. These questions should be asked now: “How should we bring identifying data together? What are the key sources? How should integration, access, and usage policies be formulated? What would a sustainable process look like?” Those questions aren’t “who” questions, they’re “how” questions, and they should be front-and-center in the national security conversation.

Maybe they should also be part of your next conversation with executives or business users? The Christmas day terror attempt is one of many, many examples that the opportunity cost of not having data governance could be high, and the consequences nothing short of catastrophic.

Finding Your Kuru in 2010

In which Jill looks beyond the hard shell.

One day while walking my dog Lu in the neighborhood I found a turtle lying on its back. I assumed it was dead, but when I bent over to set it upright its legs did a few listless strokes. Its eyes were opaque and unreadable. Right above each cheek was a small red line, an ironic racing stripe. I took the turtle home and put it in a bowl on my dining room table.

I called our assistant David, who knows about things like free-range turtles. “You shouldn’t touch that turtle,” said David as he peered skeptically into the bowl. “It looks really sick. You could get some sort of exotic disease like kuru or something.”

I put Kuru in a cardboard box filled with sand. I added a lettuce leaf and placed the box on our patio table in the sun. Then I called the turtle rescue in Malibu. A turtle rescue in Malibu is kind of like a 7-11 in San Tropez—unexpected, but appreciated when it’s really needed. I left the rescue a voicemail message describing the turtle and asking for help.

Then I went to check on Kuru. He had escaped from the box and had fallen off the patio table. Once again he lay motionless on his back. He looked like he was dead. Or tanning. I lifted him up and the telltale leg strokes told me it was business as usual. I put him back in his box next to the untouched lettuce leaf and added a slice of tomato and a sliver of cantaloupe in case he preferred fruit.

A short time later the turtle rescue called. I told the helpful woman about Kuru.

“A box in the sun??? Honey, that turtle’s a Red-Eared Slider! He needs to swim! Go put him in water quick, before he dries out like a prune!” The turtle rescue woman told me she would call me back in a few hours. “Oh, and feed him some meat!” she added before hanging up. If you could hear someone’s eyes rolling over the phone, hers were.

I filled the bathtub with 3 inches of lukewarm water, placed a small soapdish in the middle of the tub as a dry island refuge, and fetched Kuru from his salad. As I placed him in the tub, his legs scooped with more vigor as if anticipating the water below. Then he swam back and forth, as if redeemed.

We gave Kuru to our 5-year old neighbor, Trent. Trent and his dad bought Kuru a habitat, a large filtered aquarium with plants and rocks and turtle food. Trent also gave Kuru a friend, Scarlett. Kuru and Scarlett now spend their days swimming to and fro, eating turtle food, playing with Trent, resting atop warm rocks, and stretching.

Over the holidays and into the new year, I hope I find all my blog readers playing with their friends, resting, and finding their ideal habitats, stretching, and—if required—redeemed.

photo by woodleywonderworks via Flicker (Creative Commons License)

Six Telltale Signs of IT Failure

In which Jill puts her ear to the ground—and hears that giant sucking sound.

We see high-functioning IT organizations that manage their pipelines according to weighted prioritization frameworks that account for business value, available data, and consensus of need. They manage their assets proactively and apply the right skills. They know how to talk to business people.

All this sounds like standard operating procedure, right? Not so fast. There are IT organizations that wait for the business to engage, assign resources haphazardly and without forethought, fail to scope work, and use jargon so thick it would clog your arteries if you drank it.  The well-worn adage is that if you look up and you see that you’re in a hole, stop digging. If there are tools of the trade for IT mediocrity, these six are the shovels:

1. The CIO is all about keeping the lights on. There have been some high-profile decisions in the last several years—News Corp and Harrah’s come to mind—of companies deciding not to replace their former CIOs. The implication is that these guys simply keep the machines humming, right? Show me a company that measures its IT leadership by system uptime and I’ll show you a bunch of unhappy IT employees. Or a company that’s increasingly offshoring core skills.


2. IT is viewed—and run—as a resource pool. One client recently tried to explain to me how its BI team members were also responsible for delivering on non-BI projects. Uh oh. Spreading resources too thin risks blurring the lines between projects, rendering completion vague and inchoate.


3. IT management tries to squelch information or suppress feedback. A data warehouse manager recently sidled up to me after an executive readout and said, “Thanks for not throwing us under the bus.” We wouldn’t have—the data warehouse while immature wasn’t a showstopper—but he thought it might be. The point is that he attended the readout anyway. Many IT managers instead choose to circle the wagons, not participating in open forums that might result in reprioritized work tasks or suggested improvements. Worse, they’ll actively spread negative buzz about a new project or the group that’s leading it. That giant sucking sound? It’s the competition hiring your best people away and leaving you with the paranoid jerks.


4. Lack of business-IT alignment. More specifically, the business won’t consult IT before commissioning outside vendors. It’s an erosion of confidence and trust. Despite our nudging, a media company’s marketing department refused to engage IT before building a CRM solution. Finally ceding to our pressure, marketing agreed to put the internal IT organization its vendor list. IT had to respond to the RFP on equal footing with the CRM vendors vying for the work.


5. No closed-loop success measurement. Perfunctory costing worksheets hastily completed and subsequently forgotten are far more pervasive in IT organizations than aligning IT projects with business priorities. So what is success, anyway, and how do we measure it? We wrote ten thousand lines of code. Our data warehouse has 700 tables, and 450 of them contain over 10 million rows. We’re up to twelve terabytes. And yes, we’re ignoring you.


6. No repeatable rules-of-engagement. You simply cannot gather sustained business requirements by leaning in someone’s cubicle doorway dizzily scribbling into your Moleskine pad. Nor can you represent clear business needs by asking someone what data elements they want, or replicating their Excel spreadsheets in the BI tool-du-jour.

Here’s another indicator we’re seeing more often: if someone who works in your company won the lottery, would losing them put you in deep doo? If so, get a shovel and start digging.

photo by lanchongzi via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Are You Really Ready for Data Governance?

In which Jill makes excuses for people who make excuses.

Fall conference season has (mercifully) come to an end, and I can finally reflect on what I learned on my most recent tour of industry and vendor events.

(Editorial aside: I don’t know about you but I like Vegas, I love New Orleans, and if I see Orlando again it’ll be too soon. Note to conference organizers as you finalize your 2010 event planning: The Big Easy still needs our cash!  Let’s go back. The jambalaya’s on me!)

Anyway, I’ve been speaking and writing a lot about data governance, and presentations at TDWI, SAS, Teradata, and various clients have placed me squarely in the crosshairs of people aiming for effective data governance programs. It’s interesting to hear their questions, particularly as they voice concerns about data governance adoption in their organizations. One question I get in almost every session is a variation of this one:

Alright Miss Fancy Pants, why is it that every time a so-called expert talks about a major business initiative they bring up change management? Why can’t we just launch data governance without all the change management fanfare? Why can’t we just ‘get ‘er done?’

Answer: I don’t know, why can’t you? Or, more aptly, why haven’t you?  Not trying to be argumentative here, but 1) my pants are just black wool crepe, trouser-cut, which I think is more understated than fancy, and 2) it’s just that the most effective data governance programs are often also the most disruptive. And, simply put, disruption makes people nervous.

Professor Robert E. Quinn at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business writes about taking people out of their “normal states” (aka, their comfort zones) and painting a picture of what they need to do. In a seminal Harvard Business Review article in 2005 called “Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership,” Quinn described true leaders as ready to “venture beyond familiar territory to pursue ambitious new outcomes.” If that’s not data governance, I don’t know what is.

After all, the “normal state” in most companies often means contradictory policies, multiple versions of the truth, absence of true data ownership, selective collaboration, and decision-making in a vacuum. Data governance is the opposite of all that.

“We couldn’t afford to experiment with data governance,” says Kevin Davis, Director of Research Initiatives at a major southeast retailer. “We retained a consulting firm to teach us the foundational stuff and we followed their advice. That included a lot of deliberate structure, education, evangelizing, and expectations management.” Davis and his team faced the additional challenge of coupling their company’s new data governance strategy with a major MDM technology acquisition. “We knew we only had one shot at getting it right,” he says.

True, it’s easier to avoid sticking your neck out. And in some cultures (particularly in high-tech companies, but that’s another blog post altogether) wholesale changes to policies and processes can actually begin from the bottom-up. It’s not only less disruptive, it demonstrates value to incent widespread adoption. Bottom-up data governance is a legitimate and proven approach. But at the end of the day, your strategy needs to include a plan to broaden governance beyond the initial domain. After all if you’re not sharing data across organizations and business processes you don’t need data governance.

According to Professor Quinn, change happens when someone is “jolted out of his comfort zone…driven to clarify the result he wanted to create, to act courageously from his core values, to surrender his self-interest to the collective good, and to open himself up to learning in real-time.”

Are you ready to get out of your comfort zone? Then maybe you are ready for data governance!

(P.S.: I’m discussing data governance yet again with Initiate Systems CTO Marty Moseley in a December 3rd webcast. Register here!)

Photo by p_x_g via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

They’re Baaaack! IT Spending in Retail Returns

In which Jill peeks into the pipeline—and sees retail for a change!

In the arena of retailing, we’re all players. But many of us are also spectators, sitting high up in the stands and watching as the game plays out. Lately, the retailing game has been a blood sport, and household names—Circuit City, The Sharper Image, and Linens n’ Things among them—have been casualties.

We’ve been working with retailers since Walmart got its first data warehouse (my partner, Evan, was one of the system engineers on their first Teradata installation), since Kmart beamed POS data over satellites, and the apocryphal diapers-and-beer saga went mainstream. In those early days, it was all about analyzing POS data. Subsequent merchandise management and supplier exchange initiatives cemented the need for IT as both a strategic and operational enabler.

In the early 2000s, as they struggled to implement customer loyalty programs and endured criticism for over-investing in CRM technologies, retailers curtailed their IT spending. They had data warehouses—often several—and kept their attention focused on enterprise applications and e-business capabilities. With the exception of some beleaguered grocers and a sprinkling of catalog companies, we didn’t see many retailers spending on either consulting services or new software solutions.

But things are changing in retail, due in large part to five key areas that retailing executives have earmarked as strategic priorities:

Social media: It’s one thing to create a corporate avatar, set up a Twitter account, and lure customers to your Facebook fan page. It’s another thing altogether to proactively collaborate with customers on product ideas, garner feedback on service improvements, cement your brand messaging, and monitor the buzz. Retailers are getting serious about social media. After JCPenney ran a contest asking customers to post photos in their Penney-purchased apparel, the retailer’s Facebook fan base began increasing by a few thousand a day. “It’s a much more significant part of our marketing mix and it will continue to be a bigger part of our marketing mix,” said a Penney exec about social media.

Survey software: Put simply, retailers are formalizing feedback mechanisms, and executing on their findings. Several retailers we work with have announced new “Voice of the Customer” programs, driven by C-level executives. While most large retailers continue to rely on market research, they’re combining it with customer surveys at the time of purchase in their brick-and-mortar locations as well as on-line. Discounts on future purchases not only get customers coming back, but shopping via different channels—customers who shop across multiple channels are known to be more profitable—thus increasing the retailer’s share of wallet.

Master Data Management: Retailers not only need to manage customer relationships, they must share that data across sales channels, locations, and brands. Retailers came late to the MDM party but they’ve taken a seat and are listening to the music. More than ever, retailing executives are seeing the business impact of so many silo-ed applications and are mandating a “single view” of their customers. MDM not only promises to help retailers harmonize individual customer records across channels and brands, it helps them reconcile their product catalogs and store locations and standardize pricing. Welcome to MDM, retailers, pull up a chair!

Retail in the cloud: Retailers still hamstrung by headcount and IT budget cuts are turning toward the software as service (SaaS) model to enhance both operational and analytic capabilities. Many are looking to hosted services companies like PivotLink and Retail Solutions to deliver self-service, web-based analytics or to provide POS and inventory data to suppliers. Larger retailers may look to outsource customer identification and data enrichment functions by leveraging third-party providers like Acxiom. Mid-market retailers in particular have been looking to the cloud to enhance their reporting and data quality capabilities without adding headcount or hardware.

On-demand reporting: As they increasingly compete on service, retailers are exploring ways to deliver customer intelligence to front-line sales staff. “We use a range of analysis tools, from basic reporting to statistical modeling tools,” explains Kakoli Seal, Vice President of Customer Insight and Database Marketing at Saks 5th Avenue. “But getting information into the hands of our sales associates so they can deliver superior service is a priority.” Saks 5th Avenue uses sophisticated clienteling software to deliver customer contact and other details to its associates. Similarly, a specialty retailer uses mobile dashboard vendor Webalo to deliver purchase history to sales associates, thus enabling them to advise customers as they shop.

With all the emerging technology hoopla, retailers are still focused on two main issues: managing inventory levels and retaining customers. Both involve a little art, a little science, and leaders who are willing to question established industry norms. Indeed the days of unwieldy enterprise applications and IT infrastructure overhauls are a thing of the past in retailing. In their quest to be nimble, retailers are seeking new solutions—and fast.

Interested in learning more about how retailers are re-embracing business intelligence? Read Jill Dyché’s latest white paper: Information for Everyone: BI Evolving in Retail. Download the paper here.

photo by NNECAPA via Flickr (under Creative Commons license)