A taste of today´s technology

Data dojos

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EasyJet is ringing in a change in the marketing team that I think is likely to become a trend in many other functional areas of business and pervasive in business generally:  they are swapping out their Chief Marketing Officer for a Chief Data Officer role.

Never before have we had this amount of data.  We are collecting it at such a ferocious pace but we have very limited tools and capabilities to know what to do with the stuff.  The data creation part is easy but, for commercial entities, data life-cycle management and data value mining are going to become increasingly important.  Why bother to spend a lot of money collecting and hosting the stuff, if you are not getting business bang for that buck?

The trouble, though, it is that functional specialism in most organisations mean the people who need the skills (eg the Chief Marketing Officer) typically come from a non-technical background.  Whilst I predict, to the horror of all CIOs everywhere, we will see “shadow IT” once more appearing in other departments as management seeks to round out its deficiencies in doing something useful with the data it holds, I suspect the folks with the right combination of technical knowledge and business smarts will be in low supply.  Getting the jump of developing your people in-house who show promise and interest is probably going to be the fastest way to a corporate solution.

And it won’t just be in marketing.  Production systems, procurement, HR, strategy, innovation/R&D departments will all want to make something of this digitised data dessert.  Domo, the BI and visual firm, put out the graphic below in the middle of last year.  With the amount of data being generated, the sheer volume of help we need to wrangle it is growing at a similar trajectory.  It should be a sobering picture for anyone interested in navigating data for business benefit.  And needing the people to them help them.

I’d say the war for talent hasn’t even started.

About the author

Michelle

I buy technology. I am curious about how technology has changed, and its impact in the workplace and upon society. I also like street art. And dachshunds. Especially dachshunds.

A taste of today´s technology

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