Great piece on McKinsey Quarterly today. It reminds me of the old-school mantra about ‘information is power’ that led to some types of managers seeking to keep that information close to their own chests, rather than sharing it with the rest of the organisation, to cement their power base.
This is quite a long read – but worth the effort. One immediate stand-out for my world of driving eCommerce revenues:
3. How would your business change if you used big data for widespread, real-time customization?
Customer-facing companies have long used data to segment and target customers. Big data permits a major step beyond what until recently was considered state of the art, by making real-time personalization possible. A next-generation retailer will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from Internet click streams, update their preferences, and model their likely behavior in real time. They will then be able to recognize when customers are nearing a purchase decision and nudge the transaction to completion by bundling preferred products, offered with reward program savings. This real-time targeting, which would also leverage data from the retailer’s multitier membership rewards program, will increase purchases of higher-margin products by its most valuable customers.
I welcome the advent of the data-aware organisation that operates in a transparent set of market conditions. In this world, true leaders will be the ones who can read the context around the data.