Five New Ideas From 2010 MIT Information Quality Industry Symposium

Here are some quick thought from the first day of the MIT Information Quality Industry Symposium. It’s my favorite event of the year. I refer to it as the “anti-boondoggle.” All academic theory and very little vendor fluff. I suppose that what you get when MIT and the University of Arkansas organize events. I’ll either post another top 5 tomorrow, or a full recap.

Please comment if you’d like me to dive further into any of these topics.

1) Cloud Is No Longer The Focus

Last year everyone talked about Governance in the cloud. This year it’s dead. Why? I think it may be that this group, unlike the Sales 2.0, is focused on Enterprise scale monolithic systems. Last year at MITIQIS, many presentations were focused on the cloud impact on large scale information quality programs. This year, it’s all about internal, installed systems. I find this facinating. Did this group try cloud, and not see the value? Or is it that there is still a duality of idealogies: One that prefers to keep things internal, and a second that wants to move their IT responsiblility to SaaS apps?

2) Master Data Management (MDM) Isn’t The Only Solution

I was surprised that among the Information Quality vendors and practitioners, MDM was no longer the focus. Joe Bugajski focused on it, but others merely touched on how they would interact with MDM rather than focus on MDM as the central system in an Information Quality focused environment. This year, many people talked about Information Quality at the system level, and fixing business process and human interfaces to eliminate dirty data at the source. This reminded me of the Data Warehouse to Data Mart paradigm shift of 10-15 years ago. I just felt old writing that.

3) Data Quality is a Dirty Word

“Information Quality” is now in vogue. I was corrected several times in conversations when I mentioned data quality. This is somewhere between a more highbrow way of marketing ourselves, and snobery. I don’t think this matters in the least bit, but others believe it’s more accurate and lends more credibility to our practice. As you’ll notice throughout my writing, I resist heavily the practice of pluralizing the word data. I never write, “data are,” which I believe is gramatically accurate. I feel the same way here. I do “Data Quality” work, regardless of who says that term is wrong. All right… I’ll use it in this post and try it on for size. This is the Information Quality Symposium after all.

4) Free Sources Drive Down R&D Cost

Data is available from government sources and tools are available from open source communities. No surprise there, but there was in increased focus on it here at MITIQIS. Why? Talend, an information quality vendor, builds their tools on the back of those open source libraries. They credited various shared data models, methodolgies and data sources that allow them to shortcut proprietary R&B spend. Trillium also spoke up, and mentioned that they leverage some of the same open-source thinking in their full price solutions.

5) 60-90% of Operational Data is Valueless

I won’t say worthless, since there is some operational necessity to the transactional systems that created it, but valueless from an analytic perspective. Credit to Kirk Amidon for this insight - he attended the session where this stat was quoted. Similarly, Steve Adler from IBM and others discussed it in their presentations. Data only has value, and is only worth passing through to the Data Warehouse if it can be directly used for analysis and reporting. No news on that front, but it’s been more of the focus since the proliferation of data has started an increasing trend in storage spend. That wasn’t discussed at the conference… just my opinion.

10 Things I Learned at Sales 2.0 Boston

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reflecting on what I learned at Sales 2.0 Boston. I’m sure some of this has already been discussed in other posts, but I’m interested to hear which of these are most interesting to you.

1) Sales teams are demanding integrated Marketing tools to drive their business.

CRM and Web Analytics can no longer stand as separate systems. Polly Sumner described an experience where she never heard back from an unresponsive CIO, but was able to track that the email she sent was opened 17 times. This implicit interest let her know there was an opportunity at that client. Invaluable.

2) SFDC Chatter allows you to identify top performers.

Eric Johnson described the way his team was using the tool to collaborate and identify the company’s top performers. Eric and Polly both shared experiences that the real superstars of the organization shine through when they analyze their chatter follows and participation.

3) Operational Sales Reporting may not be needed in the future.

This was my most revolutionary “Ah-Ha” moment of the conference. If Chatter allows a manager to see who is taking many actions that drive results, and who is unable to interact with valuable leads and customers, then there is no need to track phone usage, leads closed, and account coverage to understand which sales reps are doing their jobs.

4) You can survive without an IT organization!

I was amazed to hear Dave Fitzgerald from Brainshark describe his systematic dismantling of Brainshark’s internal business systems. Dave sounded very proud when he described the 17 core functions that are now implemented by SaaS tools. He also discussed swapping some out that weren’t performing as expected with simple on / off service contracts. Dave is down to three FTEs supporting his whole Sales and Marketing infrastructure.

5) Siebel is not popular among Sales 2.0 folks.

My company continues to use an on-premise install of Siebel as our CRM / SFA. When I told people this, they gave me a look of sympathy mixed with dissappointment. It was like I had just told them that I had a terminal disease.

6) It takes a village of applications to enable Sales 2.0.

As I begin to think about building a SaaS based Sales and Marketing infrastructure, I realize that you need to select a series of tools that each play their role well. At a bare minimum, an enterprise would need a central CRM / SFA system, a Marketing Automation platform, an integrated lead generation engine, a Sales compensation tool, and an analytic package.

7) The table in the back corner at the Hoovers VIP dinner had more fun than my table.

This was evidenced by the fact that we took the “What will you do to fill the lead funnel?” question seriously, and they spent the same time laughing and drinking. And we still lost to Anneke Seeley’s table!

8 - The Sales 2.0 Conference will be changing it’s name to the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in the future.

As Sales and Marketing Alignment panelist, I completely agree with this approach. The best conversations at the conference were about the intersection of Sales, Marketing, Technology, and Data and over time these things will converge.

9) Sales executives get very interested when you talk about advanced analytics.

That was the number one follow up after my Panel. Everyone I spoke thought they could do better than they were today at priortizing leads, and understood that they needed better analytic tools and models.

10) I need to attend more conferences like this one.

I spend most of my team navigating internal company issues rather than thinking about ways to create revolutionary change for my organization. After attending this conference, I am more qualified to help my company succeed over time. There is no better way I can justify a day out of the office.