The Road to Information Management
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"If a magic fairy instantly gave you absolutely all the
information resources the company would ever need, do you think
people would instantly know what to do with it and how to use
it well?"
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| Peter G.W. Keen |
For a decade of my career I was a hard line, dyed-in-the-wool direct marketer,
selling products by mail order. I logged the cost of every leaflet, envelope
and stamp. I counted 'em all out and I counted 'em all back. I kept score,
and learned what worked and what didn't.
It was during those ten years that direct marketing experienced an explosive
growth, became an industry with revenues in the millions ....grew in stature
as a discipline, became a profession with it's own institute. The great
pioneers, Drayton Bird, Christian Brann, JFR* were my heroes, and I became
proud of my craft.
The rise of direct marketing was driven by two major factors - accountability
and the ever accelerating advances in Information Technology. When I first
came to manage a direct marketing team we made our plans on paper and did
our forecasts with a calculator. By the time I moved on a few years later
the team were working with sophisticated planning and monitoring spreadsheets.
The database that drove our targeting was slowly transformed too. In the
beginning you went cap in hand to the DP manager (it stands for data processing
manager, youngster - they were dragons then and are as extinct as dinosaurs
now) every time you needed a customer list. Then you waited days, or more
likely weeks, for the thud of a pile of cheshire labels on your desk.
Within a few years the PC on your desk was loaded with fast counting tools
that let you select and refine your targeting and plan whole campaigns
in minutes.
And yet despite every advance it was never enough (ask any IT person if
marketers are ever satisfied). Somehow each new project ended with the
frustrating sense that the data we really needed was still just out of
our reach.
After ten years on the front lines I got up out of my trench and trudged
off to find out why the IT cavalry never quite arrived on time. I was lucky.
I was met halfway (literally and figuratively) by the best sort of IT man
- commercially minded, technically highly capable but not so caught up
in his subject as to render him inarticulate. As we began to work together
I learned that IT had problems of their own. Time and again they would
deliver exactly the functionality specified by the business, yet the project
would ultimately be judged unsuccessful because in use the technology did
not deliver the expected return on investment.
For the next decade I found myself inhabiting the strange twilight world
that exists between the 'hit the deadline, cut the corners, make it up
as you go along but whatever you do make the targets' world of sales and
marketing and the 'big capex, long horizon, only tight project methodology
will keep this all on course' world of IT.
As I worked on projects in data warehousing, target selection, campaign
management, and business intelligence I began to comprehend where the problems
in applying IT to marketing were.
On the whole the IT boys (and by this stage, girls) were delivering exactly
what the marketers were asking for. Which was problem one, because the
marketers were frequently both unaware of what the technology could (and
could not) do, and unable to speak the language - they did not know how
to ask for what they really wanted in a way that would be understood.
The second, and even bigger, problem was what happened once the new system
was delivered. The primary IT involvement ceased with the provision of
a system that had all the requested functionality. Thereafter they maintained
it to ensure it's availability, fixed bugs, sometimes even added functionality
(in carefully scoped and planned additional phases of development).
What IT did not, and indeed could not, do was to ensure that the organisation
got the maximum value out of the new systems. They could not assure or
maintain the data quality, they could not teach the users how the data
underlying the applications they used came to be how it was, and what it
really meant (and didn't mean). Most important of all the IT function could
not teach the business how to exploit the information provided by the technology
in order to extract maximum value. This was a task IT was neither designed
for, nor asked to do. In fact nobody was.
At about this time, the big vendors and consultancies began to turn their
attention to the last significant area within organisations to remain largely
untouched by large scale IT based infrastructure projects - Marketing.
The CRM bandwagon finally brought into the boardroom concepts that most
direct marketers had been living by for years.
Like all big IT fashions there was a degree of oversell in the promise
of a brave new world of close, and profitable, relationships with the customer.
Now I encountered at first hand the phenomenon that my IT colleague had
described. Terrifying failure rates began to be quoted in the trade press
and I saw a few examples myself of the technology delivered as planned,
but the business still seeing the project as a failure.
My IT mentor always used to say (still does actually) that his job is to
'make the technology go away' This may at first sound odd coming from a
Chief Technology Officer, but his meaning is clear. The job of the business
is to pursue its own strategies and objectives, which the technology is
there to enable. If the business gets too bogged down in issues relating
to the tool itself - choosing which technology, agonising over details
of functionality and so on, it eventually falls into the trap of believing
that the tool is the objective, and that implementing the technology is
implementing the strategy.
The CRM movement learnt this lesson the hard way. Today the CRM concept
is still with us but it has become a truism that it is about strategy,
organisation and culture, not about technology.
Which is all true and useful but a key lesson has been missed. Along with
an overzealous focus on the technology, the post mortem on unsuccessful
CRM projects invariably cites issues around data quality as one of the
key reasons for failure. There is a perception that the new systems fail
to yield the type and quality of information that was expected.
When the IT function do what they do best - deliver and manage the technology
effectively - the result is that it makes the technology go away - but
there is no equivalent function to ensure that the delivery of information
is also managed to meet needs of the organisation.
I believe CRM projects, along with many other marketing technology projects
and even ERP implementations will continue to be counted failures by organisations
that have failed to address the key issue of who will manage the Information,
and how.
As a direct marketer I already had strong views on the value and importance
of data, and I have become increasingly convinced that for most companies
data is a resource that is largely unrecognised and certainly not consciously
managed.
Organisations manage their money, they manage their people, they manage
their technology. Increasingly, inspired by business gurus like Michael
Hammer even service organisations are beginning to manage their processes**
Yet in the so called Information Age there only a handful of organisations
that can claim to actively manage data, the raw material of information.
Even fewer take a structured approach to turning that raw material into
the information that can power their success.
Convinced that there was a complete function missing from most businesses,
and that information management could supply competitive advantage, I began
to apply embryonic ideas of information management specifically to supporting
the marketing of organisations for which I worked. I was entering new territory,
and as such had to make my own way. I began to seek out the pioneering
few who had begun to address this new field, and their writings, ideas,
and later constructive criticism and comments helped me to chart my course
and begin to make headway.
This website has grown out of my experiences, and is intended to act as
a both a call to arms and a resource for those who want to adopt this challenging
new discipline and carry it forward. It is unashamedly biased towards marketing
information needs, and in particular direct marketing, partly because that
is my background and partly because marketing is such a fertile place to
begin with information management. Fertile because the increasingly symbiotic
relationship between marketing and technology offers huge benefit to every
organisation - but will only succeed if the I of IT is addressed.
Marketing is also fertile ground because information is intangible, and
marketers understand the management of intangible assets (the value of
information is as difficult to measure and maintain as the value of a brand).
What is more, direct and database marketing is one of the few areas currently
breeding the hybrid people who must routinely combine technological expertise
with business understanding.
However, though my journey to information management started with marketing,
the majority of the material on this site applies equally to dealing with
data and exploiting information across the whole of the organisation.
I hope you find in it ideas you can use, links to useful resources, a place
to air your own views and most of all, food for thought.
I look forward to the day when information management is an accepted discipline,
with its own professional bodies, to a day when we no longer have to painstakingly
explain the need to manage the data resource any more than accountants
or HR people need to explain their stewardship of the organisation's financial
and human resources.
It is commonly said that the Industrial Age has been superseded by the
Age of Information, but the truth is that the change is by no means complete.
Certainly many organisations have embraced the Information Technology Age,
and in the last quarter of the 20th century have poured billions into technology
in search of competitive advantage. The big winners in the 21st century
will be those who learn to leverage that technology investment by fully
exploiting the information it provides, and usher in the Information Age
for real.
| * |
Graeme McCorkell, Roger Millington...it's a
long list. More key names turn up on this site
in the links and the bibliography. |
| ** |
To be fair, manufacturing companies have been
managing their processes for a long time, and
the debt owed by the pioneers in information
management to their forerunners in the manufacturing
quality movements is widely acknowledged. |
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business today"
Sean Kelly
Comhra |
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on data even an old Luddite like me can understand!"
Drayton Bird |
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"...a really useful resource to understanding all issues relating
to data management"
Prof Derek Holder
Institute of
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new practices and theory of Information Management"
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Information Arts |
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