Big data as a driver of organizational change

Analytics can “open up many doors for healthcare organizations” of all types, including life sciences companies aiming to get new medications to patients faster or to “provide regulatory bodies with evidence of drug safety.”  Or, for payers, analytics can “answer questions about future growth, profitability and sustainability,” or help them to detect and prevent fraud.”

It still amazes me that big organizations in so many industries are still talking about what analytics can do for them.  Of course, this headline is a little deceiving as there really is no "big data" to be found.  You get a lot of clicks when you have "big data" in the headline though.

Agile is the Key to Digital Marketing Success

Another key topic coming out of the Adobe Summit 2015 is this idea of structuring the organization properly.  Now this is an age old problem and doesn't necessarily just revolve around digital marketing, many organizations fight the structure issue.  I had a mentor that preached to be a successful organization its 80% structure, 10% people and 10% process.  Now that made the people really mad when he said this, because people always want it to be about them.  In reality, it is about them, what he was trying to say is without the proper structure, it doesn't matter how good your people and processes are, they can't thrive if they are always being stifled.

So a day in the life of a digital marketer is too reliant on other individuals for them to be a success, they are stifled by the system.  Now they may produce content and delivering good results, but if the structure of the organization is not optimal, it is preventing these outstanding individuals from being great.  Once the marketer has to jump through so many hoops to achieve the end goal, they are already making compromises.  It may be they are making compromises on the content because they know the content creators will give them push back, or have too long of a timeline, so the request becomes watered down.  The landing page may need a little extra something to up conversion, however that may need a new set of requirements for the web team to build, so to keep things moving the marketer doesn't add that piece.

To be great a digital marketing organization needs to be agile.  Things are changing constantly and the digital marketer needs to move at the same pace, if not faster, than the consumer.  Today the digital marketer is 10 steps behind the pace of the consumer.  The organization tends to be divided into marketer, technical and creative.  These all need to live under the same umbrella.  The second a marketer is waiting on IT or a creative agency, the marketer is not fast enough.

The marketer needs to have those departments set them up for success.  So IT needs to set up the hardware and get the marketer the tools to be self reliant.  IT should not try to control the content being moved and updates that need to be made to websites, landing pages or apps.  Creative agencies need to set up multiple templates and ensure there is enough creative content to fill those templates, but they should not be a roadblock to any content that is released.  If a new email and landing page needs to be created for a real-time need, the agency or brand should not be involved in slowing this process down, the digital marketer should have all the tools and messaging already at their disposal.

If the organization is set up so the digital marketer can see the opportunity (data), glean insight from the data (analysts), create an audience (technical), create a new email marketing campaign (database marketer), create a landing page for the email (creative and technical), create a cross channel ad campaign for that audience (media and creative) and then measure the results (data and analysis), then the organization is set up correctly.  The digital marketer should be enabled to go through this entire process without needing IT tickets, agency or brand approvals or pro-forms to be created and approved from the executive team.  Allow your digital marketing team the freedom to be successful.  Measure their success, give them a budget and guidelines, but empower the digital marketer to drive revenue and jump on opportunities.  The results will speak for themselves.  

Running Corporations as Autonomous Business Units?

Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

It amazes me there are not more companies copying what Apple has done from an organizational structure.  Apple doesn't let each business unit run as an individual business, in fact they don't even own their own P&L.  This allows them to move resources and work more autonomously as a team, rather than infighting and creating different tribes within the organization. 

The divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources….  [one former executive said it created a] “warring tribes” culture. “If you were in a different business unit, we were in two competing companies,” he says. “Cooperation and collaboration aren’t there.”

This doesn't surprise me at all.  I've seen it many times in my career in smaller organizations, watching all the tribes compete with each other.  The battle is outside of the organization, not within.