You must have noticed how everything around us is growing into a network. Or should I say, everything is becoming a network AGAIN. Because we used to be all about closely knit and complementary communities, living tribes, family societies, small local villages, etc. where everyone used to know and support each other. But as our cities, our organizations and our economy grew, things became increasingly disconnected. The fabric of things stretched to a maximum until everything grew so far apart that things no longer worked as they should. To compensate, today, we are linking everything again and bridging the ever widening chasms. We try to stimulate cross-departmental collaboration within our companies, to close the wide gaps between us and our almost ‘anonymous’ customers with personalized services, and even to interlink our entire electricity grid for a smarter energy management.
Yet, while everything in our environment is becoming increasingly interconnected again, it seems almost surreal how on the other hand decision makers seem to follow a very silo-ed vision on their digital strategy. I am not exactly talking about how many companies still organize their data in closed off silos and therefore missing essential intelligence that could come from merging and analysing them. Nor am I specifically alluding to how business still doesn’t team up better with IT for more durable technology efforts. No; what I am talking about is how the CEO has heard that “everyone is ‘doing’ social listening” and then fixes a meeting with his IT team and tells them “let’s do something with social media monitoring”. After the meeting, they try to make it happen and acquire HootSuite, Radian6 or Engager. With hardly any positive results and everyone ending up disappointed. Unfortunately, this scenario happens all too often these days.
If you really want your digital fabric to have an impact on your business, you have to stop adding new and trendy solutions on top of the existing ones. Because in this way you will obtain merely an unconnected compilation of databases and applications. What you need, on the contrary, is an application network that is ‘alive’ and has real interlinking arteries with live data streaming in between them. Self-evident as this might seem, time upon time I have noticed that this is usually not how companies work in real life.
Before organisations do anything they should take a thorough look at their digital approach and architecture. What do they have, what do they need, what are the gaps and which are the biggest priorities? And when they figure out what is missing and what should be replaced, they should carefully devise a strategy and a matching practical roadmap of what to do in what order and why. Unfortunately, and strangely enough, this first assessment step is all too often omitted.
Though social listening tools can indeed offer so many actionable insights to underpin marketing activities, customer support or even R & D, they will have little impact if the rest of the organization is not ready. If its data architecture is so scattered and disconnected, combining it with the social media data will offer little intelligence. Organisations might also lack the agile marketing tools to act upon these insights in a timely fashion, which makes them then basically superfluous. Social listening is great, but if the information governance of the company in question is a disaster, then obviously investments should first be made in that area. You don’t build a new state-of-the-art floor in your old house, if you have a serious problem with your foundations. Just like that, do not add analytics – however sophisticated and smart they might be – when your data system is all too shoddy.
Like I said, have your applications work together like a smart network – interlinked and feeding each other with (near) real time data. Start with the basics. Add step by step layer upon layer of integrated solutions. And make sure that each addition follows the roadmap in the right order. Do not acquire a sophisticated CRM system if you are not sure that the underlying data are correct. As they say “garbage in, garbage out”. Or do not use web analytics if you cannot connect their data with your CRM. And don’t even try Big Data if you do not have the means to react upon the intelligence they bring in real time.
My advice: do not put your entire IT budget into one fancy analytics solution without careful self-analysis. Think digital roadmap, first. Think digital transformation. And make sure you end up with a smart and durable digital ecosystem rather than a potpourri of data and solutions. So always remember: strategy first and only then connect all what needs to be connected.
How is your organization doing on both sides?
Michaël Deheneffe, CRM Consulting Director at Business & Decision
