If you’re in an enterprise business, do me a favor.
1. Take out a sheet of paper.
2. Scribble on it for about 5 seconds without looking down.
3. Look at your paper.
You might be able to tell me where it ends, but can you see the path you took to get there? It’s a mess! That’s how muddling through big data works without a robust data analytics function.
Marketing departments need to be able to produce great results based on big data and seamlessly work with the IT departments according to the IDC’s top CMO Predictions for 2013. The problem that many enterprise businesses have is that they collect tons of possibly relevant data, but then have no way of analyzing what they collect. Others collect no information at all.
Imagine if you had the platforms in place to support a data analytics function that will produce the information you need to make better decisions.
Imagine if you had the marketing technology talent to adapt to that change.
For the enterprise companies that don’t, they risk being as lost and confused as that scribble I had them draw earlier. What’s worse, they’ll probably be crumpled up and thrown away by their industry much like they are crumpling their piece of paper to throw away right now.
For anyone who watches HBO’s Game of Thrones, it’s the classic House Stark mantra: Winter is coming. Well, there’s a storm coming – a serious one if marketers can’t adapt. It reminds me of when I asked my grandfather Jimmy Hall what was the scariest moment of his life.
He told me of a time when he was in third-grade in Mobile, Alabama. Back in those days, he usually walked to school from the farm. When he got to school, he put his coat and backpack up and the teacher went over arithmetic first. Next was literature. Not an hour or so into class, a teacher from one of the other classrooms rushes into the one he’s in and exclaims that the school needed to be evacuated. Jimmy was confused. This had never happened to him before.
So he went home. His mom was gone and dad was in the fields working. His brothers and sisters hadn’t come home yet either. He was alone. He sat near the window