Having spent more than two decades working in IT organizations on decision support, data warehousing, and analytics systems, I have a good understanding of IT capabilities related to analytics.  Unfortunately, most IT areas are sorely lacking in their knowledge of the business and even more so in their analytics knowledge.  IT is very effective at storing and managing transactional and other granular data but generally terrible at putting it in formats suitable for business use and analytics.

A typical marketing analytics platform project is very dependent on the business users and analysts to define the structure of the data and define how it will be used; IT doesn’t have the knowledge to add much related to data or usage.  Combine this with the high cost, long implementation time, and typical resource constraints and you have a recipe for failure and frustration.  The good news is that is doesn’t need to be that way.

With the availability of a cloud-based analytical platform like Clario, you don’t have to be dependent on capital project approvals or IT resources.  The platform is easy enough for a business user or analyst to do some fairly complex analyses and easily access data that may have been previously unavailable.  Assuming that the business users have or can get access to basic flat files for the data of interest, they can transfer the data to the cloud, combine, manipulate, and summarize the data and look at it in infinite ways - variable by variable or in combinations. 

This is a platform where you can be doing valuable work to understand your customers, promotions, and business within a day.  All you need is an internet browser and the ability to transfer the data you need via secure ftp.  All hardware and software is included in the monthly fee.  To top it all off, you can collaborate with any of your co-workers which is not even a possibility in most marketing analytics platforms.  You can grant access to anyone else to view, alter, or run your analysis. 

With the availability of options like Clario, it makes sense in a lot of cases to skip IT for your marketing analytics solution.

About Dave Fickes
Dave Fickes is Clario’s Vice President of Integration and has over 25 years’ experience designing, implementing, and using large scale marketing data platforms that support advanced analytics.  Having spent his career straddling both the analytic and IT worlds, he uniquely understands what is needed from both sides to realize the true value hidden within an organization's data.