Best (and worst) example of this I recently came across was an FMCG client that wanted us to develop a website for their new ‘water’ beverage ... when asked ‘Why?’ (the Objectives) ... she said, ‘To be 360’.

The technologies and strategies have evolved, been honed and become more complex. But everyone on the battlefield is using them. This raises the bar for all concerned and makes big results much harder to achieve. No excuse for pursuing glory rather than results. No excuse for not learning from glorious failures. Tom.

Unfortunately, many senior “strategists” get left behind by technology, through lack of knowledge/time or whatever, they pluck out “key words” from some article they have read and push them as strategy without truly understanding the implications for the foot soldiers and consumers.

But then again..the world is not perfect, and egos abound in our industry.

Nick unfortunately reveals a sad truth here. Strategists and planners need to be genuine strategists and planners, and “not a few of them” aren’t the real thing. If they are only part of a sales operation and don’t think about implications, long term objectives and infrastructure, they only succeed by luck and client gullibility. Their days will be numbered.

On the other hand, convincing clients to invest in long term data strategies is really challenging because it costs, and needs simplified “painting of pictures” of a rosy future. We still have to sell our best good!

I don’t care about the gloss, as long as everyone understand that hard work needs to be done to get real results. Everyone also needs to understand that the quant/tech/data side is only part of the story. An integrated story…

Tom - sometime “Data Strategist”.

Sometimes we are so enamoured by our strategy that we take the outcome for granted – or, God forbid, lose sight of it. Although the outcome is sacrosanct, and therefore to be determined before everything else, sometimes we are unsure if the strategy determines the outcome or the outcome determines which strategy to deploy.

I’m reminded of a dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where…” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Good post!

No matter how beautifull the strategy, design or technology is; if it does not deliver results, the execution is a failure even if you have great web analytics tools.

But please, a little bit more optimistic

Just like the web, web analytics started in IT, and then marketing found out about it and took control. We are there now, but successful data-driven businesses (and they do exist!) understand the value of the web and have optimized some of their most important business processes around it.

I feel that the industry is maturing to a level where we will not only talk about using web analytics for marketing optimization, but we will be talking about analytics for business processes optimization and strategic level changes.

As such Web analytics and e-business will finally receive their own seat at the board room table as deserved.

This was one of my outcomes of last week’s eMetrics Marketing & Optimization Summit in San Francisco and also my personal feeling on the way our digital marketing project our evolving from “Launch & Leave” to “Birth, Educate, Optimize and Grow”

You can read my other outcomes on the URL below:
http://activemetrics.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/emetrics-san-francisco-part-1/

Cheers,
Johan

Director Relationship Marketing & Analytics
These Days

Business Outcomes is clearly the driver of IT today and the focus of our client HP’s whole approach to the market. Business Technology and oppossed to just IT. The implication is a metric based on the drivers of the business as oppossed to metrics based on monitizing 3rd party web vendors. Johan is correct—business is staring to get it.

High-end monitoring solutions for IBM Mainframes use to just look at components on the MF to ensure performance and availability. But then the MF platforms started integrating with the web and distributed servers.

So IT wanted to look at entire transactions from “End-to-End”. Following that came “Business Processes” which are just transactions linked together.

SLA contracts followed in parallel and were tied into monitoring “Business Processes”.

Of course, in the real world implementing a proper “Business Process” monitoring solution is usually a far more resource-heavy, time consuming, and complex project than the White Papers makes it sound like.

Eventually most IT departments end up “faking it” with partial and disconnected solutions.

And you know what?

That’s all everyone really needed to effectively fulfill their department’s business goals. The rest is just expensive complexity.

Define your desired business outcomes and then measure the right thing, not everything (of course you have to know what to measure).

and today Business Outcomes can be many things and we need to make sure that we are measuring and being measured for the right things

love the site.

http://www.artofapproaching.com

Business Outcomes is clearly the driver of IT today and the focus of our client HP’s whole approach to the market. Business Technology and oppossed to just IT. The implication is a metric based on the drivers of the business as oppossed to metrics based on monitizing 3rd party web vendors.Downtown Toronto lofts