If you have not seen the Oracle Data as a Service offering, it maybe something you’ll want to consider. Why? Big Data is now one of the hottest topics. The issue is more data is not helpful unless the data is actionable and it provides insights to act on. What seems to be on Oracle’s mind is:
- Separating data services from applications
- Allowing the data to be used by any application of your choice and
- Offering external data to enrich business results.
In essence, what we are talking about is making data scalable, have interoperability, portability and well of course — last but not least, secure.
A data-driven business would need the answers to these types of questions, for instance for:
- Marketing: Who should my prospects be? or How should I segment my list? or What should I say? or What have I said in the past that resulted in high lead conversions rates? The type of data Marketing would need would be information about a prospects shopping interests or past transactions
- Customer Service: What are customers saying about my products / services/ our brand? Or What types of trends should I be looking for? The data the business would need would be around what are people saying about the brand and what are they sharing about the brand?
- Sales: How can I tell if I am talking to the right person in the organization who can answer my question or am I just wasting my time? Or what are all the ways I could get in contact with the company? The data needs there are things like business data and linked social handles to actual people in the company.
The outcome for Marketing would be that the Marketer would have the right prospective audience and be able to service up the right ads and content across any channel. The outcome for Customer Service might be the ability to increase retention with better social listening and sentiment or signals on how customers are feeling about the brand. For Sales the outcome might be improved sales efficiency with better insights and leads that convert to more sales, higher value sales or longer customer lifetime values.
But many businesses are lacking the competitive edge they should have when using data. This is often because the business:
- Lacks a common data identifier across channels and across the enterprise
- Finds it difficult to verify the quality of the data from the various sources of data (your own or data from 3rd party sources)
- Has data in silos and it can not be easily transferable into an action across various platforms
- Has a bunch of point solutions that don’t connect with enterprise-wide view of the data
- Has not figured out the complex legal, commercial and privacy rights to navigate with the data and stay in compliance.
One solution to these issues appears to be what Oracle is presenting as Data as a Service (DaaS). This is where the data is offered as a service, and is uncoupled from any application and targeted to a buyer for a specific use case and easily integrated into a business application.
The four components of that are:
- Data Ingestion
- Value Extraction
- Rights Management and
- Data Activation
across all channels, with an ID unification system or process and a scalable infrastructure.
After the briefing, an example of the use of this type of system was shown for Marketing, where there was a 5x lift in performance vs traditional data and 2.5x in performance goals using data modeling. The audience for this type of Data as a Service for Marketing is targeted at Marketers, publishers, ad networks, exchanges and tech vendors and would be used to prospect at scale, serve up relevant ads and content across online, mobile, search, social and video.
An example of Data as a Service for Social showed a 5x in fan engagement, competitive intelligence, consumer intent capabilities and purchase language insights (i.e., know what your customers are saying when they actually are talking about buying something….) The ability to extract valuable information from unstructured social data is key to understanding consumer behavior and serve them well. The audience for this type of data is Marketers, customer service executives, Sales, e-commerce and social media managers.
To be able to give attribution to what is driving customer behavior, understand that and then use it to make real business decisions means that companies must be able to know more about who the data is coming from and what the data means, which leads us to the idea of “addressability and ID (identification.) This ID graph is key to making the data operationalized, scalable and result in a business outcome. The question for you is, where are you on the maturity capability of your data and are you using a data as a service vendor or parsing through data in separate systems and trying to tie it together later?
Big data brings big promise. It also brings with it big issues if one is not skilled in the area of data addressability and ID to result in business outcome attribution. Where do you think most companies are on this Data as a Service maturity capability scale?
@drnatalie
VP and Principle Analyst, Constellation Research
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