Being pragmatic, I like to think of process. What process does an enterprise need to go through in order to harness the wonders available? Well the sensible place to start with is data. And I say this because it doesn't matter if your key driver is to improve sales, reduce marketing costs, make better products for tighter markets. It doesn't matter what you want to achieve; ROI, business improvement, business speed or better quality decisions, data helps you make better informed business decisions.
I really believe that data is going to change us as a society. As we move forward we will have tremendous insights in science, humanity, society, health and in business, but until recently the technologies haven’t been ready.
Business leaders have always known what insights they wanted but they didn't have the mechanisms or technologies to churn the data to discover those insights. Big data has the answers and the challenge has been integrating all those data types together.
Now we can take data from multiple locations; mainframe data, SAP systems, logistics systems, transactional, web, email and retail. We can take structured data and unstructured data, we can take data from different repositories and put them all together to be more insightful about what we do and make better business decisions as a result of it.
Data driven companies tremendously outperform the non data driven companies. Data is a key business enabler. The ability to fully integrate multiple sources of data and then visualise it to make discoveries and insight is truly liberating.
This is a fun time to work with data. There is so much opportunity. There is so much change. We can completely change how we think about data and how we analyse it.
Don’t be left behind. Sometimes innovation becomes the status quo more quickly than you think. The first e-revolution was electricity. Think of the competitive advantage that presented.
Dom Chudleigh
Dom joined
Purple from specialist digital and marketing automation business ViralJab, where
he designed and implemented automated multi-channel marketing strategies for a
range of companies. Prior to ViralJab he was group account director at internet
and digital agency, Wisechoice.biz. He started his career as a graduate trainee
at Ogilvy & Mather and has worked in both agency and client side in the UK
and internationally. He is currently studying for an MBA at the London School of
Business & Finance.