FEATURE ARTICLE
Is there a Gap in your Organization?
If you attended the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City this year, you heard many of the speakers touch on the same subject; the interaction between marketing and technical groups, or the lack thereof.
Too often we see companies that are months or even years into using an analytics tool and still cannot get the data that they want due to poor interaction between marketing and IT when it comes to implementing and maintaining analytic tools. Is it lack of communication? Or miscommunication? It’s even more than that!
There are four primary issues contributing to the conflict and ultimately underuse of analytics tools:
misunderstanding, fear, trust and support. In order to realize your goals and get your tools in place properly and quickly, you must overcome these hurdles.
Misunderstanding
There are typically two parts to misunderstanding; the first is what you want to do and second is how to actually achieve it (technically).
To create the integrated marketing environment, you need nimble and reactive analytics tools and processes to help drive your success. To do this, more and more marketing groups are realizing that they need more control over the implementation and management of their analytics tool. In most cases, IT does not truly understand the tool you have purchased and therefore has misconceptions about how you’re managing it would make it better. You need to clearly lay out a plan for maintaining the tools and your goals so each group is clear. IT will then be much more likely to work with you and hand over some control, just as they have started to allow you to control the content on your web site.
The second misunderstanding is that an analytics tool is a “set it and forget it” solution. Not the case! Online analytics is a continually evolving process that requires regular attention. Analytics tools pose a unique challenge for IT groups. Traditionally IT groups build their technology in modules so they can build teams and isolate problems. However, the analytics tools span the entire enterprise and therefore many development teams. How do they manage something that is just a little piece of their daily function but spans the organization? Plus, a good tagging framework requires some foresight and planning to be somewhat self-maintaining and have the ability to be modified or added to quickly. To do this you must make the tagging part of your development process or find a way for your marketing group to manage it.
Working with IT to determine an effective tagging and management is much easier once each group truly understands the goals, processes and what it takes to manage the tagging.
Fear
The knee jerk reaction that most IT groups will have is the fear of what this tool could do to them, not for them. Seth Godin’s description of the purple circle on his head, said it well. We are all concerned that we will do something that will leave a big ugly circle on our career for years to come. This fear often causes people to throw up walls, become naysayers and turn off their ears.
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Ted Stites is Manager of Consulting Services with Numeric Analytics.