Plug and Pray? Don’t pray to win. Play to win.
You may be familiar with the business maxim:
If it depreciates - lease it.
If it appreciates - buy it.
Wise words that you’ll find businesses the world over using to guide clients in a sensible investment direction. Car - lease. House - buy. It makes sense.
It’s advice that has crossed my mind a lot recently as I’ve discussed various “Insight-as-a-Service” products with industry colleagues. Insight Leasing Platforms (for want of a better definition) that offer to take your data pain away with quick-fire data reports.
All you need to do is plug and play, the slick presentation will tell you - just connect your data, select a dashboard and hey presto! Quick, easy, digestible insight at your fingertips.
It’s a seductive concept.
An “Insight-as-a-Service” provider handling all the data warehousing, modelling, all the tech, all the infrastructure and simply presenting the information to you.
But as with anything that sounds too good to be true, once you lift the lid you don’t have to look too far for the unexpected. In the case of “Insight-as-a-Service”, as well as unexpected complication, cost and control issues, I’d argue that the single biggest drawback is based on that depreciate/lease, appreciate/buy truism.
Don’t Treat Data as a Commodity!
Data - it’s your most valuable asset. A long term strategic asset. And it’s an asset that APPRECIATES over time. The more you collect, the better you learn to interrogate it, the more value it offers. But you need to invest in your own platform to achieve this. It needs to be yours. You need to OWN your own.
Why would you hand your data platform over to a third party? Locking yourself into someone else's infrastructure might have short term conveniences, but are there long term strategic benefits? I don’t think so.
Businesses too often fail to recognise the cumulative qualities of their platform. A data platform evolves and appreciates in value over time to drive sales, improve customer experience, reduce risk and support sustainable strategy.
Farming that data dividend out is simply subscribing to short termism.
Cost - It All Adds Up
It's not uncommon for a mid-sized organisation to rack up a ￡100k+ spend over three years outsourcing their platform. Not that it will ‘feel’ like ￡100k+ at “only” ￡3k a month (plus bolt on extras).
Did you know that there’s one platform that even charges you over ￡400 per month just to have your branding on the dashboard?
And what do you end up with after a 3 year subscription?
Nothing – the Insight-as-a-Service companies own EVERYTHING
Actually that’s not strictly true. You are left with a choice.
Either you continue paying ad infinitum or you can start again from scratch.
Your data is your IP. And your platform is the magic that knits it all together. Over time you build layer upon layer of business logic and continually improving practices, that make your data, and your insight reliable, repeatable and defendable. Your single version of truth. Yours and yours alone. And all the time the value of that insight is appreciating.
So own it.
A Fractured Lens
A hugely underrated and unappreciated benefit of building a company-wide platform is the contribution of each department in enriching your overall data platform with their own individual insights.
Why fracture this aggregate gain? When marketing subscribes to XYZ platform, opens an API and produces reports for their own department only, you lose important emergent properties. Don’t let the sum of your parts amount to less than the whole.
While different divisions/departments might not want to share data at the outset, the richer insights delivered by a single, inhouse platform will soon silence any territorial politics.
Unforseen Setup Complexity
Unless you have a data source that’s exactly the same structure as everyone else using that application, plug and play is but fantasy.
That quick, seamless integration you were promised?
Of course it needs to be set up.
It doesn’t just happen of its own accord. Integration takes commitment and it takes expertise. Most of all it takes time and money to get right.
All That Glistens
Now I’m not saying these tools don’t have a place in the market. They’re certainly a way to deliver short term insights for a project.
And yes, I get it. Nobody wants a quarter inch drill. They don’t even want a quarter inch hole. They want custom shelving, packed with books, looking pretty. Just like nobody wants a data warehouse - they want decision enhancing, business building insights.
And I’ll be honest, there have been occasions (when clients have absolutely insisted), that we too have provided “Insight-as-a-Service”. But a little investigation and a little explanation will usually make clear that a more strategic, internal platform based approach will reap stronger more sustainable rewards for their business.
Why?
Because best case, going down the Insight-as-a-Service route, you start with some quick visualisations and end up with dozens of touchpoints, each a dashboard version of an animated spreadsheet. Visualisations that might damage a business if built on poorly designed data models.
Compare that to our approach of building, managing and evolving data models that you own and that continually improve the accessibility, availability and value of your data over time.
Because, more importantly, all you’re doing is moving silos and failing to benefit from the multiplier effect of combined sources.
And because you’re not a spectator. You’re a participant.
Don’t pray to win.
Play to win.
Remember:
If it depreciates - lease it.
If it appreciates - buy it.
The value of your data appreciates.