Categories: Cardinal PathStrategy

Cultural Transformation in the Age of Data

In this blog, guest author Brian Harris, Chief Product & Marketing Officer, Western Union Business Solutions, discusses the role of culture in becoming a data-driven organization.

Adopting a data-driven culture—and changing the mindsets of stakeholders to use data to drive decisions—may be the biggest obstacle you face, but also the most transformative. Moving through the various stages of digital maturity means making strides in several key areas of the organization. But moving through the various stages of digital maturity means you are making strides in several key areas of the organization. And culture is one thing that needs to be transformed in order for businesses to truly leverage the digital intelligence available to them.

Three points for catalyzing an organization’s cultural transformation include:

Create an identity and purpose
Advance your technological capabilities
Develop evangelists within the sales organization

Educating an organization to rely on customer and prospect data to drive the way you deliver value necessitates a change in mind-set:

Enable marketing and sales to work closer together
Discuss the philosophy behind such a change, in addition to the logistics
Reassure stakeholders the role technology capability plays in changing both culture and performance

Though most marketers today want to start making a shift towards being a data-driven organization, few really have a handle on how to make it happen:

Involve the right stakeholders
Be unrelenting in the organization’s commitment to customer outcomes
Transform data into a learning opportunity

As a marketer, you are tasked with creating a sense of identity and purpose using this data-driven technology in order to serve your customers better. Address your brand identity and purpose. Connect it to your ultimate goals and when you’ve got the strategic and technological infrastructure in place, devote yourself to getting people–all of the people in the organization–to understand why you’re making that journey.

John Hossack

For more than 10 years John Hossack has been working with companies both large and small to help them improve the performance of their online channels. John’s passions and much of his time are spent focusing on analytics, usability, and conversion testing with the goal of improving user experience and business conversion rates. John has presented at the eMetrics Summit in Toronto 2008, SMX Toronto 2008, 2009, and 2010 Web Analytics Association events, spoke at and emceed the Internet Marketing Conference 2008, 2009, and 2010 in Vancouver and numerous webinars including those of the American Marketing Association. John is a Sr. and Founding Partner at Cardinal Path, a performance optimization firm, as well as being a Past President of the International Internet Marketing Association. Prior to getting involved with the web John was a Treasury Manager and currency trader. John Hossack holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management and a BSc in Economics from the University of Victoria. John is a contributor to the Cardinal Path blog (CardinalPath.com/blog) and tweets under @vkistudios and @johnhossack John and his wife Pamela currently live in Vancouver British Columbia with their daughter Molly.