It is time that business leaders tell their IT organizations that their data matters. It does not make a difference whether you are talking about customer data, marketing data or supply chain data – modern businesses run on data.
CIOs have told me that they personally have a hard time making the business case – without you – saying that your data matters and should be protected. CIOs need your help to change this. They need your help to justify making the investment needed for your data. Here is what real life CIOs have told me.
“Organizations that actually behave like data equals new oil is a single digit percentage.”
– Stephen diFilipo, CIO JRS“Often the biz is in the dark and needs advocacy. ‘Oh, is there a way to get that data?’"
– Jonathan Feldman, CIO City of Asheville
You can help your CIO by sharing the value that you derive from your data, and then as well, determine the impact of its unauthorized outside release. To help you here, let me share what I have previously regarding digital disruption.
Digital disruption has brought data to the forefront. It has become how you win at customer engagement and how, in many cases, you deliver the value proposition to your business. As the MasterCard advertisement put it a few years ago, the value of this data with predictive or prescriptive analytics has become “priceless.”
Or to put it differently, data is now the basis for most businesses’ go-forward “right-to-win,” a term made famous by Paul Leinwand of Booz & Co. in 2014. At the time, this term expressed how enterprises with a coherent set of capabilities can enter business with better odds of winning than other market participants.
In digital disruption, data becomes the capability that determines whether you win or lose when pitted against a digital disruptor.
So what about the impact of a data loss? For all businesses that are consumer-facing, the whole game is about using data to gain a competitive advantage. But imagine the impact of the release of non-public consumer data to the customers that you are trying to build intimacy with.
Theodore Levitt said in "The Marketing Imagination" that the goal of a business is to create and keep a customer. Destroying customer intimacy is a surefire way to both destroy your brand, and more importantly, put your organization in a cycle of not converting prospects or keeping customers.
The impact of putting together your customer data to deliver better service is huge, but the impact of it being hacked and released is even greater.
There can be impacts for B2B business, as well.
Increasingly, data is the product or fuel of the business relationship. A release of sensitive data can impact you and your customers. Protecting data here matters to your business relationships. And this does not even consider the impact to things like compliance for regulated industries.
But we want to hear from you now, and at the same time, we want to give you an opportunity to express your opinion with work colleagues and IT leadership on casual Friday. So here it is.
Tell us why your data matters to your organization. This is easy to do. Tweet @Protegrity #MyDataMatters and tell us why. The winner of the best tweet for the week for the next 10 weeks will win a #MyDataMatters t-shirt. Let your IT organization and colleagues know today why your data matters and why they should invest in perfecting and protecting your data.
Article written by Myles Suer
Image credit by Getty Images, DigitalVision Vectors, sorbetto
Want more? For Job Seekers | For Employers | For Contributors
