#data4growth

I took a three day course in #data4growth at the Irish Management Institute last week. I wanted to figure out how to manage all the data, big and small, that companies are acquiring on a daily basis. Coming from a marketing background I am intrigued by the buzz words in this industry, “data analytics”, “it’s all about big data”, etc. The first thing that comes to my mind is spreadsheets, databases, and statistics!! Hence I never thought without technology you could possibly manage data. I was wrong, and a very enthusiastic group of lecturers from UCC prove me wrong. Here is how I have interpreted #data4growth from a digital marketing perspective.

First of all, it is about management of data as a strategic asset and not about the technology. This takes us to the importance of understanding the sources of our data, how do we collect data, where does data come from?

The information supply chain by Dr. Tadhg Nagle is a very simple model which allows to structure your data and to view the key activities involved in each stage of the process in order to generate value for the organisation.  I have adapted this model with the view of digital marketing and the main data generated from digital sources.

There is no doubt that data can come from many sources and in many different shapes, having a structure and a mind-set within the organisation allows managers to create current and future value. It is about changing the way we think about data, using iterative cycles of design thinking and design doing. For example, in digital marketing we use innovative methods to design online personas, a fictitious character drawn from a segment of current or potential consumers. Developing a persona beyond their demographics characteristics, bringing the character to live by understanding their online behaviour and motivations, why do they shop online? Why do they follow certain brands and why do they enter certain online competitions?The most important pillar of this diagram to me is Governance, it is based at the bottom as the foundation of your data supply chain. There is many reasons for this but mainly, as emphasised by Paidi O’Reilly, the problem is not the data is the mind-set we use when we are looking at it. It is the conversations that data creates when we let data collate.