I recently read a great article from CIOonline about the need for a good relationship between the Chief Information Officer and Chief Marketing Officer because of the increasing costs and relevance of Big Data in the marketing space. I enjoyed the piece, because I also believe the increasing role of CMO’s is reflective of the increasing requirements for companies to leverage sophisticated data analysis. Which makes me very excited, since I love data analysis and business intelligence.
There is an increasing tug of war inside of most organizations for CIO, IT, and data scientist time. These struggles for mindshare are generally resulting in most Big Data analysis projects focusing on revenue generating applications. This is why CMO’s are now spending more on technology than any other office (besides the CIO), because they are learning to leverage big data to better drive revenue for the business. While it makes sense for businesses to focus Big Data projects on revenue-generating applications, this leaves other parts of business operations without access to data analysis tools and results that can positively influence their functions.
While there are plenty of other reasons that some business functions lack access to data analysis and Big Data applications, constraints on the availability of IT resources, concerns about information security impacts, and lack of data analysis expertise all contribute to prioritizing which functions win and which ones lose when it comes to data analysis. This is why the article touts the need for a good relationship between marketing and IT, or really any company in the organization and IT, because resources are scare and priorities vary from group to group. The good news is that software as a service (SaaS) data analysis solutions are making it easier for business operations to subscribe to turnkey solutions that overcome the lack of IT resources while addressing information security requirements and increase access to data analysis expertise.
The concept of Oversight Insights On Demand™ is simple – make it easy for companies to provide data, safe for the data to be transported, stored, and analyzed outside of the company, and make processing the data quick, and making it available for review. Oversight’s Insights On Demand solutions are designed to address this data analysis void for business managers, and can be used for all disbursement functions including accounts payable, purchase card administration, and travel and expense management. Insights On Demand leverages the power of data analysis combined with the advantages of cloud-based computing and best practices analytics developed over the past ten years.
Effective and valuable data analysis should be easy for its consumers to make happen and also understand. Insights On Demand is focused on providing the answers to questions that business managers already know to ask, and helping them facilitate what they already know to do based on those answers. Business managers don’t always have the time and sometimes may not have the expertise for complex data analysis. Insights On Demand is designed to help address these situations. It’s perfect for company departments who may not have such chummy relations with their IT departments, or even for the ones that do.
