How Can I Increase Data Integrity in My Organization?

Hi Joe,

The data situation in my organization is a mess. Whenever it’s time for Sales and Marketing to collaborate, they both bring different insights to the table from data sets that don’t correspond with each other. As a result, our data is unreliable, and we struggle to be proactive and make confident decisions about campaign activities and spend.

What sort of change needs to happen to improve our data integrity? How can I encourage teams in our organization to participate in sorting out our data?

Thanks,
Siloed Sam.

Break silos: To align your efforts, avoid duplication, miscommunication, and rogue analytics coming from each business unit, all your data needs to live under one roof. Your first move should be to invest in a central data warehouse, where your teams can easily maintain the cleanliness of your data through master data management and data cataloguing.

Allocate costs based on each team’s resources: Modern platforms like Snowflake offer easy ways to allocate the cost across the organization as storage and compute are distinct and can be tracked by line of business. This lowers the barrier to entry for organization centric data management and teams with limited budgets can invite more teams to join and enable easy data sharing among them without bearing the whole cost.

Get leadership buy-in: Marketing and Sales teams that lack data literacy tend to shy away from data management. To overcome this, leadership needs to infuse the value of data into your culture, whether by requesting data from Marketing to clarify insights and support decisions, by investing in data enablement for their marketers, and by setting a course for data and reporting initiatives.

Find the right people to lead the charge: Any data transformation effort needs to be staffed with people who know about data pipelines, BI, and how to present to various stakeholders. Depending on where these skills lie, this initiative might live under your CMO or IT. Is IT’s partnership with Marketing strong? Can MOPs translate the technicalities for Sales and Marketing? Consultants and agency partners can jump-start the process, but you need internal clarity beforehand on what your organization wants to achieve.

The rise of new data warehousing tools like Snowflake has made it more achievable than ever for businesses to de-silo their data with minimal upfront investment. As more Marketing activities take place online, the consequence is growth in campaign data; take advantage of these newly accessible methods for sorting, capturing, and analyzing data, and your revenue machine will run more effectively than before.

You’ve got this,
Joe Pulse.