I recently attended a webinar from Gartner on Mobile Marketing and Data-Driven Marketing. Do look up the interesting statistics shared in the webinar. What stood out in the webinar is that, highest priority is given to Analytics, besides building the application itself. From my experience, lot of the Marketing / Advertising programs are outsourced to outside agencies, who run the programs end to end. Typical role IT plays is in pulling some data files needed for the program. That will be the end of IT involvement and they may never hear from Marketing.
Although that scenario is changing, IT should pro-actively engage with business to collaborate on key strategies like Mobile Marketing. The Gartner data suggests that 50% of the companies are not doing the analytics on their Mobile Marketing data today. That indicates that IT is not engaged or not even aware of these programs. Some of the key strategies IT should explore to engage with business are:
- Leverage existing Information Governance organization to engage in Business initiatives
- Offer Data insights by proposing combined data (internal & external data)
- Emphasis on the Data Quality and internal competencies to manage these programs effectively
- Partner with business from the tools selection stage, play internal Data advisory role
This may be, the meaningful Big Data business case, you have been waiting for. Engaging from the get go with business, will help you leverage your internal strengths (people, process, data) and effectively align IT with the game changing enterprise strategy. Mobile devices could be your next big master data domain. Mobile devices are not just phone numbers but they are the Master data, linked to the activities mobile owners perform on the social media like, locations visited, ads viewed/responded, sites browsed and social interactions performed.
