The buzzwords here are Big Data and analytics. In developing a digital strategy, these can play a varying role – again, based on what you’re trying to achieve in digital.
Part four of a series
The different roles data and analytics play in a digital strategy go beyond digital marketing, with Google Analytics almost as varied as the data itself.
Examples of how we’ve seen data and analytics incorporated into digital strategy include:
- Capturing and using data about your customers’ digital interactions with you—tagging your online sites and capturing who is visiting, what they’re doing, what are the moments of truth and where do you need to make adjustments – to better serve them.
- Incorporating feedback from that digital data into the product and/or system development process in real time to iterate and improve the customer journey.
- Using metrics to measure the effectiveness of your digital transformation: Trending key KPIs that measure how “digital” you are over time, and making these measures visible indicators of progress.
- Creating the technical infrastructure to capture, store and integrate data from many sources and serve it up to users (and systems) across the enterprise.
- Developing an integrated enterprise data management function, strategy and governance process.
- Selecting and implementing the right technologies, tools and platforms for gathering data, processing data, visualizing data and storing data in the cloud — all to make using the data easier.
- Using internal or external data sources real-time within the key business process, such as accessing third-party data sources as part of an underwriting process.
- Creating analytics capabilities, hiring data scientists and making analytics a core competency or major innovation that disrupts how things have typically been done.
- Incorporating predictive analytics into apps to tailor a customer experience in a personalized way.
- Changing your organizational culture by incorporating the use of data, analytics and measures into how people do their jobs across functions and roles.
Each of these uses of analytics within a digital strategy is guided by a specific business objective. Identifying those objectives, and building the capabilities to deliver them using analytics, takes a different path in each case.
Digital leaders are leveraging new tools, new sources of data and integration of data into their products, services and processes to differentiate themselves. Determining the role of data and analytics should be part of developing your digital strategy.