If data is the new oil, why have sludge?

Another day, another US state privacy act (Hello Virginia)! Another quarter, another digital transformation push!

How do you bring attention to improving your enterprise's state of data for a future ready organization - both to redefine customer experience as well as build trust with consumers and regulators alike?

As organizations continue to accelerate their push into digital, and as regions around the world (and US states in particular) keep adding privacy laws, data continues to rise in prominence.

Digital transformation and Privacy laws both need robust customer data management!

Example, data requirements for a digital transformation initiative to sell subscription instead of products, and complying with GDPR, CCPA etc. may need the following.

? Opt-in, communication preference management

? Billing, transaction, delivery and RMA management

? Robust data security controls with data retention and masking

Often, these capabilities require CRM, CPQ, digital marketing, eCommerce and other customer experience enabling technologies.

Interchanging data between them requires standardizing data models and the underlying data lifecycle processes (as well as solutions) to ensure a highly quality and usable information oil.

How are forward thinking organization doing this?

We are seeing a number of companies apply a holistic mindset to map customer data to their organization's strategy and privacy regulations in equal measure.

Here is how they go about it.

• Identify gaps and issues with current customer data to build a compelling use case - both for business initiatives as well as privacy ones.
• Create a roadmap to optimize data, often programs that span 2-5 years but can start with some lower hanging fruits.
• Get executive buy-in, often by joining forces with Marketing, Legal, Finance, IT and others.
• Proactively, prevent creation of more data copies, and bring governance to reduce ad-hoc data model changes.

Most executives know they need better data management, but struggle to make it happen.

Here are some areas that commonly come up in our discussion with customers, and have profound impact on the long term health of enterprise data.

• Designate system(s) of records - Is Salesforce your customer master? Is it at least the master system for Leads? How would this work with Marketing apps?
• Reduce data copies - Almost every company has a one-off email solution for their home grown system. These are the 'death by thousand data cuts' for your organization.
• Better customer data models - Platforms like Salesforce have introduced the "Individual" object to enable more comprehensive MDM capabilities. More here
• Lock the backdoor - Sandboxes often carry real customer data. Mask customer data to prevent any data breach. Here is more on Salesforce data masking
• Minimize production data - Old and obsolete data is a liability. Data minimization and retention improves overall efficiency and may be a legal requirement.

Lack of effective data management is a competitive disadvantage and potentially a legal liability.

After all, if data is the new oil, why have sludge in your enterprise?