The Web’s Next Phase: Data Driving Integrated Marketing Departments | Social Search

This article was initially published in 2013. While the current state has improved, we still have a long way to go.

A leading cause of departmental siloes is that everyone is accessing and possibly creating their own data, and inefficiency is created by making the action of sharing, compiling and then assessing this data an action at all. There is rarely a widely accessible central hub for everyone to automatically feed their data into, thus many people rely on manual feeding and office email to compile data. It only takes a few people to be on holiday, or to have left the company without immediate replacement, for whole systems to deliver serious inconsistencies or grind to a complete halt. In many businesses data is reported but not actioned for so long that the action of sharing is deemed worthless and stopped.

I love this quote! It is an excellent and concise explanation of a virtually universal choke point within all types of organizations. If leaders and managers want to change from where they are today to where they need to be, it will help first to recognize what state they are currently in. It is worth taking some time to understand the depth of the meaning in the quote above.

For some context, read the entire article. I think it is a great read. The author posted this in response to watching Scott McCorkle’s keynote at ExactTarget’s Connections 2011 conference. Reading the article left me wondering how long it will take most marketing folks to catch up to this leading edge of data-driven marketing we are in today.