New Trade Routes

Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.

Seattle, WA USA

Trade drives the way people interact.  People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path.  Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival.  New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.

 

Getting Past Barriers to Big Data Initiatives

January 15, 2013  /  Jay Leon

We work with big technology companies. If there is anyone that should doing Big Data, I would think it would be big technology companies. It is harder than one might think however. Often very simple problems like duplicates or obviously incorrect entries will trip up a data management plan even though the industry came up with ways to deal with such problems decades ago.

Here are a few of the things we see preventing our clients from truly using Big Data:

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  1. Legal Departments: The legal department does not play to win, they play to not lose. They would much rather prevent the collection of data than otherwise. After all, a company that has not collected any data does not have to worry about losing data in a breach and then getting sued.
  2. Poor Planning: Good data handling takes time and effort. Data initiatives invariably take longer than a quarter to implement, and longer than that to produce returns. Almost all companies are looking to hit the number this quarter.
  3. Internal Competition: Competition between departments can cause them to hoard data (at best) or go underground with their data (at worst), creating silos of data that is riddled with duplicates and inaccuracies.
  4. Turnover: The people in charge of these data initiatives have their eyes on bigger and more important (more visible) jobs -- so they change often. The person taking over the job is just as uninterested in long term data health, so the problems go unaddressed.

As with many promising technologies, Big Data's biggest challenge is not in the technology but in the way people work together inside companies. There are enormous gains to be made by the companies that realize what can be done with these new tools and organize themselves in such a way to take advantage of it.

Why the big gap between the promises of Big Data and the on the ground reality? Data management initiatives are always a secondary part of any marketing project plan. Actually, we would love it to only be in second place!

Our approach is to accomplish data maintenance and data enhancement while pursuing other objectives. At the end of any single project the data has not been completely rehabilitated – but progress has been made. After a dozen projects things are looking much better. At the end of the year – the data looks completely different than it did and the fun part starts: making use of a deep and wide database that can be used to dramatically improve outcomes.

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