The Data Czar and His Ministers
I live in a relatively small, rural town of 50,000 residents spread over 61 square miles. My specific neighborhood still has a good number of original owners of the development that was built in the early 1960s, attracting those young families looking to escape from the cities and using their GI benefits from WWII and Korea for life in the country. Those early Baby Boomers are aging now, leading to a fair share of emergency calls for assistance. During the last five or six years, I have watched something develop in response to these events which puzzles, amuses and often annoys me. There was a time not long ago when a 911 medical call would bring the local First Aid squad to triage, treat or transport the patient to the ER. Now, however, that same 911 call will bring an ambulance from the neighborhood First Aid squad, the local volunteer fire department and the town police department for the initial evaluation. And then, very often in more serious cases, the Regional Trauma Ambulance will be brought in for transport and treatment. Aside from the fact that every one of them will look to bill an insurance company, the overkill of five response teams converging on a single location is wasted time and effort.
That, my friends, is a perfect real world analogy to the cursed data silos that are always lamented by marketers and database analysts. Every team and business unit wants more than their piece of the communal data pie, but hold on tightly to their own secret stash of hot leads and information.
In larger towns and cities, especially those looking to implement shared services, you now see more appointments of a single public safety director covering and coordinating all police, fire and emergency service departments rather than having individual chiefs for each.
For those of us in the business of marketing, retention, loyalty, acquisition and other roles within a larger organization, it is becoming more and more beneficial to utilize a Data Czar for the coordination, application and rules enforcement across all available resources. This position filters through all the noise, all the excuses, all the naysaying to ensure that the resources are utilized for the bottom-line greater good of the entire company.
As in the example of the community Public Safety Director, the Data Czar cannot function as a middle-level management position trying to coordinate well-established and usually powerful teams. This role has to have the authority and autonomy to demand the cooperation and involvement of the team leaders across all business entities as a direct report to the most senior corporate leaders. In a larger organization, it would be a C-Level individual with the support and direction of the CEO or president. Whether the Data Czar is a team of one, or heads up a Data Forensics and Business Intelligence group focused on the discovery and integration of every data resource is entirely up to the focus of senior management in their goals and direction for the company.
The initial task to getting started is a deep dive of discovery with every department or business unit to create a full and accurate inventory of data sources, which includes methods of acquiring and updating; where and how it is stored and secured; available formats and content; any limitations of use; and an understanding of how this data is used in the performance of business functions.
As the initial data dive phase is moving along, a secondary discovery would begin across all of the teams and departments, determining who needs what data, why it is important to their team, how often they use it and where it is utilized. Along with the critical needs of currently available data here is a good opportunity to find wishlist items for other known or potential data resources that might provide lift to response or even incremental revenue opportunities if additional data were readily available.
Then, gathering up all of the collected information, the Data Czar brings it all back to the office and dumps it all into the giant magic funnel that spits out a complete and accurate business model document which gets distributed, never to be seen again.
Or … maybe … not quite so fast.
In reality, the real project begins at this point. As I quoted in last month’s post on integrating the vision of Big Data, “A commitment to a desired business outcome is the critical success factor,” and there will most likely be a phased approach based on immediate short-term goals vs. the long-term direction for the profitability of the company. Working with the company direction in mind, the Data Czar will turn to the various business analysts, data strategists, research, intelligence and security team members, as well as business unit leaders to develop the final plan.
This plan will include the policies and procedures for measuring ongoing success and adjustments. It will address the consolidation and inclusion of all data determined to be relevant to success, the appropriate segmentation, cadence, tempo and channel of contact with existing customers vs. prospects and leads. The plan will determine attribution of revenue to the data source, ownership and time limits of hot, medium and cool leads vs. the general marketing pool. It will determine adherence to corporate, industry, governmental security and best practice policies.
In all, it will establish the initial framework for all things data. Never will it be final, but the Data Czar role is not a short-term project. The position will set the standard for the organization’s data strategy and direction for years to come and will settle a lot of interdepartmental bickering over usage before it happens—and especially before petty feuds escalate up toward the boardrooms.
