Data is increasingly becoming the topic on everyone’s lips. Although “data” has been around for a long time, smartphones, smartwatches and internet advertising are so commonplace these days that people are becoming “obsessed” with the purpose and implications of managing data – both good and evil

With this growing awareness of data management, marketers need to become more savvy on its role and how it can provide endless opportunities to develop a customer profile. However, it is a shame that there is still a stigma lingering over data’s role within the industry. Too many times, data is perceived as uncertain, sensitive and highly difficult to handle.

For decades we have talked the language of IT and left it up to our direct customers to explain the proper care-and-feeding of data to their business users. Small wonder it is way too hard for regular people to understand what we, as an industry, are doing. After all, how we can expect others to explain the do’s and don’ts of data management when we haven’t clearly explained it ourselves?

I say we need to start talking about the ABCs of handling data in a way that is easy for anyone to understand. I am convinced we can: if you think about it, everything you learned about data you learned in primary school: It has to be clean, safe and connected. Here is what I mean:

Clean

Data cleanliness has always been important, but it assumes real urgency with the move toward Big Data. I blame Hadoop, the underlying technology that makes Big Data possible. On the plus side, Hadoop technology – an open source software project designed to deal with large amounts of data - gives companies a cost-effective way to store, process and analyse petabytes of nearly every imaginable data type. And that is a problem, as companies go through the enormous time suck of cataloging and organising vast stores of data. Put bluntly, big data can be a swamp.

The question is, how to make this swamp potable. This isn’t always easy, but it is always necessary. It begins, naturally, by ensuring the data is accurate, de-deduped and complete.

Connected

Now comes the truly difficult part: Knowing where that data originated, where it has been, how it is related to other data and its lineage. That data provenance is absolutely vital in our hyper-connected world, where one company’s data interacts with data from suppliers, partners, and customers. Someone else’s dirty data, regardless of origin, can ruin reputations and drive down sales very quickly. For example, hackers can enter point-of-sales terminals through a supplier’s project management and electronic billing system. This recently happened to American retailing company Target. We won’t know for a while the full extent of the damage. We do know the hack affected one-third of the entire U.S. population. Which brings us to the below:

Safe

Obviously, being safe means keeping data out of the hands of criminals. But it does not stop there: today’s technologies make it very easy to misuse the data we have at our disposal. If we are really determined to keep data safe, we have to think long and hard about responsibility and governance. We have to constantly question the data we use, and how we use it, This poses questions like:

How much of our data should be accessible, and by whom?

Do we really need to include personal information, like social security numbers or medical data, in our Hadoop clusters?

And as I think about it, I realise that everything we learned in kindergarten boils down to the ethics of data: How, for example, do we know if we are using data for good or for evil?

That question is especially relevant for marketers, who have a tendency to use data to scare people, for crass commercialism, or to violate our privacy just because technology makes it possible. Use data ethically, and we can help change the use.

 

By Marge Breya, Marketing expert at Informatica. 

 

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