Don’t Overlook Intent Data for Data Governance

Successful business requires smart, informed business decisions, and informed business decisions require timely access to reliable data and its insights.

Failure to provide your business users with accessible, timely, accurate, and complete enterprise data has a shockingly negative impact on your ability to make better-informed business decisions, according to Derek E. Brink, Aberdeen’s VP and Research Fellow of Information Security and IT GRC.

In his research report, In Data, We Trust: How Business Users Benefit from More Effective Data Governance, Brink explores the impact an investment in more effective data governance capabilities has on the quality and speed of business decisions.

Aberdeen refers to data governance as the orchestration of the people, processes, and technologies needed to leverage enterprise data as a strategic asset to help your organization’s business users make better-informed business decisions.

Effective data governance is a cornerstone to business operations. The efficacy of an organization’s data governance determines the efficacy of their business decisions. For an example, pretend you are tasked with purchasing a cake for an event your company is hosting, but you don’t know:

• the number of attendees,
• how many folks have food allergies,
• if it’s only gluten allergies, or if there are also egg allergies,
• what the cake is specifically celebrating, or
• where HR – or was it Delegate Recruitment? – keeps all this information …

What are the odds that you would, or even could, decide on the most appropriate cake for the event? It’s unlikely that you could ascertain which cake is the right decision.

Of course, a cake is far from an important business decision, so apply that hypothetical cake decision to a major business decision with consequences and rippling ramifications. Now, systemically reapply the same scenario to all the business decisions your organization’s users regularly make.

As it turns out, business users leveraging enterprise data that is accessible, timely, accurate, and complete, make better-informed decisions. On the flip side, business users making decisions based off data that is not available or timely, is inaccurate or incomplete, are making far less-informed business decisions.

“In the absence of information, decisions are made based primarily on intuition and gut feel, or worse yet, bad data,” according to Brink.

Buyer Intent Data Governance

Effective data governance shouldn’t stop at the traditional sense of an enterprise data set. If loose data governance leads to poorly informed decisions, the same principles should be applied to any business decisions made based off data – especially those made by Marketing and Sales.

Buyer intent data is, for some Marketing and Sales organizations, uncharted territory. Those organizations would do well to hold off on self-led expeditions into the data-rich land of buyer intent signals, because there’s not only a lot of ground to cover, but a lot to get wrong if you’re going off intuition or gut feel. Aberdeen refers to that as “flying blind,” and it’s not a recommended strategy.

When a business user is conducting active research on the web, they emit buyer intent signals. One of the trickier parts of leveraging buyer intent data is that there are a lot of online signals emitted — all the time. Using intent data without a strict framework that adheres to the data governance principles Brink explores (accessible, timely, accurate, and complete data) is, at a much larger scale, like flying blind and using your gut feelings to navigate. In other words, it’s a huge risk.

Aberdeen’s technology separates the normal noise of online activity from those bona fide buyer intent signals, and it’s the most accurate way to predict who is actually in-market to make a purchase. Because these intent data sets and the insights gleaned from them are on demand (accessible), up to date (timely), qualified (accurate), and at the largest scale (complete), any decisions made using this data are intelligently informed, or better-informed, as Brink puts it.

Marketing and Sales activities can be informed by qualified, on-demand, up-to-date, and sweeping data sets, but finding a partner in the intent data and market intelligence space is crucial to attaining this heightened, informed decision making.

Sloppy intent data sets, or purchase intent signals that aren’t qualified, timely, or available to your Marketing and Sales organizations can only contribute to worse-informed decisions.

If you’re flying blind with unavailable, out-of-date, inaccurate or incomplete data sets, you can’t inform your Marketing and Sales activities of buyer intent. That means your marketing campaigns have essentially gone back in time.

If you have poor data governance of your contacts, their intent, their behaviors, demographics, firmographics, and / or their stage in the buyer’s journey, then your data is of poor quality, and the best you can do with that is to make – statistically likely – poor business decisions.

Up your chances of successful, better-informed business decisions by embracing Brink’s principles of effective data governance for all of your business data.

Access In Data, We Trust: How Business Users Benefit from More Effective Data Governance here.