Unlocking Business Potential with an Enterprise Data Activation Platform
Kenneth Wagner
Leading the path to your Agentic Layer & Maximising Value from your Data Assets
In the ever-evolving business landscape, I’m reflecting on the conversations I’ll be having in the coming months and beyond. Central to these discussions is the concept of data activation, a crucial component for driving business value and especially value from AI. However, the opening question to me is this: Do you have an?Enterprise Data Activation Platform?
Now, I want to make sure we linger here. I’m not asking whether you have a Data Lake or a Data Warehouse or a CDP etc.
I’m asking if you have an enteprise data activation platform. Let’s focus on the data activation part first.
What do i mean by Data Activation?
The essence of this discourse goes beyond categories such as Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, or Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). The crux lies in the ability to effectively activate all of your data across the enterprise. In today's corporate environment, organisations are navigating through a complex web of systems, including:
These systems, integral to both back-office and customer-facing operations, unfortunately often operate in isolation, creating data silos. This results in a world where each function tries to optimise for their own domain, but the reality remains: Marketing doesn’t have access to the Data Lake, Sales doesn’t have access to Marketing data etc. - this means we’re continuously seeing a landscape of “data silos” or data that is “trapped” in their respective functions.
The Challenge of Integration
Integrating these disparate systems to enable seamless data flow remains a formidable challenge - and even the best companies does not want to move data around endlessly within their system.
Even the traditional CDPs, while designed to aggregate and utilize marketing data, often fall short of providing comprehensive access across sales, customer service, BI, and finance departments. Hence it is maybe better to not call it a customer data platform, but rather a marketing data platform - as it is a platform that powers marketing use cases, it’s not one that activates the data for all business functions.
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The Imperative for Unified Data Activation
This underlying question of this post is a singular, critical question:?How can an organisation effectively activate its data across all business functions?
The future state we should be thinking about, is how to achieve a unified data ecosystem ensures that insights derived from various sources like Data Warehouses, CRM systems, and ERPs are harmonized, fostering a shared understanding and maximising the value that this data can generate,?when it’s activated.
The Role of Enterprise Data Activation for AI
Understanding AI's potential underscores the importance of data quality. The efficacy of AI, as illustrated by advancements in technologies like ChatGPT, hinges on the richness of its data sources. Thus, the future of AI and data within enterprises necessitates a robust platform capable of activating data across the entire organisation, enhancing decision-making and customer insights through a comprehensive 360-degree view.
Now, as a professional deeply immersed in Salesforce's Data Cloud products, I acknowledge my bias towards our innovative Zero Copy/Zero ETL capabilities. However, the broader challenge remains universal:?How do you activate all of your data, in a harmonised view, across your business functions?
This is a critical question to answer, if you have any aspirations towards proper usage of AI in the next 2-5 years. The more holistic an understanding the AI models have of your customer’s and thus of your data, the better results the models will provide you..
The Path Forward
Once you start thinking about how this will be done within your company, you’ll eventually land at a hypothesis. The pivotal question then becomes:?How quickly can your enterprise implement such a transformation, and is this timeline aligned with your strategic objectives?
Martech & Data Architect
1 年I like the AI flavour to this. The current problem that I see is how Data Warehouses / Lake houses are positioned in relation to activation. We often talk about "in the moment" or "real time" when the bulk of our data is partially stale and less relevant. Even with Zero Copy (which is a great cost reduction method) you are still running cron jobs against a central mass that likely rely on cron jobs from operational stores to fill it. It's critical to find the right integration strategy for the right subsets of data that could actually benefit from low latency. Eg. Adopting eventing or streaming platforms to connecting into activation.
I love the focus on the word "activation" - because I see so many companies struggle to actually ACT on their data.. even of you crack the code on integration and harmonization, #thestruggleisreal to understand your data and most of all - execute on a plan of action based on your data! Hooray for action-words!
Good one Kenneth Wagner! The post triggers the right question that needs to be asked in order to harness the data across the enterprise.
Business & Technology lead - Large Enterprise Manufacturing, Consumer Goods & Retail | Services I AI, Tech & Engineering I Sustainability & Innovation
1 年Thanks for a good read Kenneth Wagner - A good mindset to follow to gain a common ground when talking about Meeting customer needs by activation data in the Customer Journeys ??