Centre-out & getting data right, fast.

With customer personalisation, next-best-action and orchestration an ever growing theme in conversations with brands it's fascinating to acknowledge the pressure a shift to a more 1-1 approach puts on data & analytics functions. Over the past 5-10 years the underlying sands of enterprise architecture have been shifting within many organisations as they adopt cloud data platforms to house customer data with major migrations to the likes to Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform and similar. Marketing and other business stakeholders justifiably are crying out for functional and actionable customer profiles to feed their personalisation aspirations, putting significant pressure on data & analytics teams who are desperately trying to stay focussed on their strategic migrations to the cloud.

The pressure is real and as Pega's Rob McLeod rightly points out, the value opportunities are too big and within grasp for businesses to ignore, with their Centre-Out approach providing a clear and fast path to value. With the commercial benefit of personalisation and better orchestration critically required by businesses it is important to question how data & analytics can quicker serve the needs of personalisation & next-best-action programmes.

"Finding an approach which delivers personalisation & next-best-action capability whilst holding fast on enterprise data transformation is essential."

Unfortunately in some cases this dynamic can and has led to a separation between the data and business worlds in a tussle to pursue their own strategic goals. With marketing, sales and service pushing for accelerated data access tactical solutions have been created, building outside the strategic data visions of companies and creating limited functionalities, poor data recency & quality and an inevitable technical debt. Often customer privacy and data security find themselves at risk of compromise also and data is shuttled around in ways and by teams who do not and can not act within the appropriate governance.

But worst of all and more often the failure to align data to the business creates a friction that leads to inaction, with the ultimate victim being the P&L with personalisation and next-best-action programmes get pulled, paused or cancelled - These are not the only options however and an increasing cohort of forward thinking marketers and data leaders are finding a way forward.

"For established businesses in particular, alignment of customer oriented initiatives to data & analytics vision is non-negotiable."

Both the extensibility and relative speed of cloud data platforms has created the opportunity for organisations to curate a set of actionable customer profiles which can grow and enrich in line with both strategic data initiatives and the priorities of the wider business. At Loop Horizon we have often guided an approach in which an 'Audience Profile Table' is created with a cloud platform, made up and referencing customer data assets which are production ready and warrantied by the enterprise data architects. These assets can grow over time and the 'Audience Profile Table' simply benefits and can support the ever increasing set of use cases required by the business.

This approach allows the 'Audience Profile Table' and correspondingly personalisation & next-best-action programmes to natively inherit the standards and governance required for robust execution. Most encouragingly this is an approach which brings the best work and aspirations together from both marketing and data colleagues, fast realising the shared vision of data driven customer experience.

The pressure to deliver commercial and customer value has never felt as extreme and it's powerful to see how through alignment and collaboration approaches can be found to meet near-time needs with longer term strategy. The last thing brands need are more hurdles or wrong turns to navigate and as Rob McLeod says:

"Doing this stands to put(s) unnecessary complexity and obstacles between your customers and their goals - including by delaying your transformation until you’ve got your data how you think it needs to be."

An approach which brings data & the wider business together to achieve results is within reach thanks to the advances in cloud data platforms but most importantly the ability for functions and teams to works together towards a common goal and the 'Audience Profile Table' approach is just one example.