As people discuss artificial intelligence, the machine-learning community is focusing on an important topic. This topic is highly relevant to marketing leaders: the shift towards “data-centric AI.”

Data scientists, programmers, and engineers used to be the only ones driving AI advancements. Now, marketing leaders must actively engage in data-centric AI. 

In the digital age, marketers can benefit from using data to make decisions. They can also personalize customer experiences and improve customer engagement. Additionally, businesses can enhance predictive analytics, automate repetitive tasks, make better predictions, and enjoy other advantages.  

Andrew Ng: Data-Centric AI 

Andrew Ng gained recognition for founding Google Brain Research Lab and Coursera. At a recent MIT conference, this AI pioneer discussed the importance of “data-centric AI.” He defined it as “the discipline of systematically engineering the data needed to build a successful AI system.” 

Ng highlighted a pressing challenge. Many companies in different industries, like biotech and manufacturing, can’t fully use AI because of problems with their data. These datasets lack proper labeling, organization, and consistency—essential prerequisites for effective machine learning (ML) systems. 

Isn’t All AI Data-Centric? 

This simple answer to this common question is “no.” Many AI projects focus on creating the best model for a dataset using a “model-centric” approach. In contrast, data-centric AI prioritizes the creation of the highest-quality dataset to train an ML model effectively. 

Historically, AI has been mostly model-centric, emphasizing aspects like model architecture and hyperparameter tuning. Practitioners and researchers often considered the data fueling these models as static ground truth, beyond their control. 

Preparing Data For AI Success 

Ng and other experts suggest changing our mindset and focusing on the enhancement and preparation of datasets within companies. This will enable us to maximize their potential in AI. To make this shift, successful organizations must collaborate with data scientists who work closely with experts in the field. 

Data Labeling, Augmentation And Distribution Drift 

In a data-centric AI approach, the focus shifts to data quality, data augmentation, and data deployment. This approach may require multiple attempts to find and correct labeling errors, fill in missing information, and select the best examples for training the model. 

Data Labeling 

Data labeling is adding tags or labels to data to make it understandable and useful for machine learning. Accurate labeling is crucial for optimization. Inconsistent or unclear labeling can confuse AI systems, resulting in higher costs and less effective AI deployment. 

Data Augmentation 

Data augmentation is a technique used in machine learning and data science. It helps generate additional training data by making slight changes to the existing data. It helps improve the performance and robustness of machine learning models. 

Data augmentation is helpful for creating additional training data. However, it can also result in errors, which makes it costly and less valuable. So, it’s vital to use data augmentation strategically to improve data quality and make AI models more accurate.  

Distribution Drift 

Another challenge for marketing leaders using data-centric AI is understanding distribution drift. It happens when the data used to teach a machine learning model doesn’t match the patterns in the new data. This is typically because of changes in consumer behavior or external factors. As the historical datasets become outdated, they yield inaccurate results.  

For example, to predict customer churn, a marketing leader must consider biases and limitations in past churn data. 

• Does the time period truly represent a typical business cycle, or were there one-time events skewing the data? 

• How is “churn” defined and measured?  
• Does churn depend on changes in product usage, cancellations, or declines in repeat purchases?
  

Understanding these factors is the initial step toward determining the data to include in a model. To fix distribution drift, check how well the ML model works and adjust it as conditions change. This avoids expensive mistakes and keeps people trusting AI systems. 

Placing High-Quality Data at the Core of Marketing Leadership 

Using a data-centric approach to AI is the best strategy for overcoming these challenges. It also promotes cross-team collaboration within organizations. 

Marketing leaders can collaborate with data engineering, data science, and machine learning experts. This ensures that we train models using the appropriate data. Furthermore, collaboration encourages the development of comprehensive data governance strategies, ensuring the quality of collected and used data. 

Marketing leaders can use AI to gain competitive advantages by effectively managing data. Data-centric AI improves how businesses utilize their data. It enables the creation of AI and data-driven solutions that are more accurate, reliable, and cost-effective. 

Marketing leaders can make AI solutions a reality by focusing on data quality and using data-centric AI methods. They can also take advantage of the many opportunities in the rapidly changing AI landscape. 

About The Author 

Lilith Bat-Leah, Vice President of Data Services at Mod Op, is responsible for strategic consulting on use cases for data analytics, data science, and machine learning. She has more than 11 years of experience managing, delivering, and consulting on the identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, and production of digital data. Lilith also has experience in research and development of machine learning software. She specializes in the application of statistics, analytics, machine learning, and data science to natural language and other unstructured data. She is passionate about making impossible things possible and is driven by curiosity.

“In the world of AI, good data is our compass. With it, we can confidently navigate the future, instead of fearing it.”

 

Every day, someone says that generative AI, data science and artificial intelligence are changing your world, and you should take action. It could be a media headline, a conference speaker, or a popular online post. Generative AI will greatly affect our lives. However, leaders often lack clear guidance and next steps. 

Many business leaders find messaging on AI and data science confusing, technical, and lacking clear guidance. It often creates stress for leaders and their organizations because they feel they should be doing something—but what?  

Rather than stress about the future of AI, one thing an organization can do today is strategically focus on its data strategy. The fact is that a lack of quality data causes most organizations to struggle to meet business needs. That’s even without AI in the picture. 

Good data quality is crucial in AI. It’s the foundation that will make it faster and more affordable to adopt. Without quality data, you’ll find it nearly impossible to effectively execute AI in your organization.  

Marketing Illustrated: A Case In Point 

Let’s evaluate an email marketing use case as an example. Email marketing is a powerful tool for marketers across both B2C and B2B. Companies regularly use email campaigns to accomplish a range of objectives, such as enhancing brand awareness and boosting sales. 

Marketers have optimized everything from email copywriting to audience segmentation. However, most marketing automations are not leveraging dynamic Customer 360 data. 

For example, imagine a marketer begins a campaign by claiming their brand is superior. They also offer a limited-time discount on a new product. But they send the email to a list that’s so diverse, it includes customers and prospects that it really shouldn’t. 

This includes the following recipients: 

• Customer A – A long-time customer who has experienced issues with a product. They have contacted customer support multiple times within the past two months. They are not very happy with the brand right now. 
• Customer B – Has been purchasing products for several years. They highly appreciate new product launches and frequently make purchases, sometimes beyond their financial means. The fact is they are behind on their bills and often make many returns, causing a financial loss to the company. 
• Customer C – A prospect on the email list who has recently visited the website. If analyzed, behavioral data would show there is a high likelihood of conversion. However, they are on product pages that are different than the one discounted in the campaign. 
• Customer D – A prospect with behavioral data that indicates there is a high likelihood they will not purchase from the company. 

A lack of true, dynamic Customer 360 data limits the marketer’s options. Their latest email campaign will reach inboxes, but it may not work or could even backfire and have a negative impact. The question is, “Can AI address this issue?” 

AI can improve marketing automation when used with a strong Customer 360 data strategy and a reliable governance process. This combination allows for high-quality and timely data. 

However, AI is not a magic bullet. It can’t fix data access and quality problems. AI can’t automatically tie together customer support and finance systems.  

To prepare for a future with AI, focus on your data now. This will help you adapt to the upcoming world of AI and data analytics. 

AI With Quality Data 

When a company has good data, using AI becomes practical and affordable, creating new opportunities. AI can analyze the tone in customer support conversations. It can determine if someone who recently had issues is satisfied or dissatisfied with the brand. This could result in predictive machine learning driving simple decisions about whether to market to them. 

Using behavioral data, generative AI can create personalized content to improve the likelihood of converting specific individuals or defined personas. AI can predict profitable customers and if customers with valid cards are more likely to convert. Of course, this is all based on Customer 360 data being accurate and accessible to AI models. 

Where To Begin 

To prepare your data for AI, choose a domain like Customer 360 or Supplier 360 and ask some questions: 

• Do you have a defined set of attributes for the domain?  
• Do you have a system of record that is your trusted source for all the attributes in that domain?  
• If you have multiple methods of record, can you access a Customer 360 view across those systems? 
• What is the quality of your data from an accuracy and completeness perspective?

If there are gaps in your responses to these questions, it indicates that there are tasks requiring your attention and action. The starting point is defining the domain, understanding where the data sits, and lastly understanding the quality drivers behind it. 

That will be the starting point for your strategy. This will result in a working strategy, which includes making sure your marketing stack can produce the correct data. To improve data, make it accessible, and integrate investments in data quality into regular business operations. 

Who Can Provide Help 

Business leaders often seek technology vendors to solve their data challenges by purchasing software that can address all their problems.  The list of vendors outside their doors is growing daily.  Tech leaders agree that they must deal with strategy and governance before adding more technology to the mix. 

Listen to vendors to understand their approaches to data and data designed to support AI efforts. Use this knowledge to solve strategy and governance problems first. Then, approach your stack architecture with the assumption that a single vendor cannot solve everything. 

Lastly, contemplate the process and culture changes you will need to successfully implement your data strategy. If your organization needs help, hire a digital strategy firm or consultancy that works with any vendor. 

About the Author 

Derick Schaefer is the Senior Vice President of Technology at Mod Op Strategic Consulting. He focuses on using technology and process to develop customer-focused business strategies. Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Trintech Inc. and held VP roles at Digital Insight and NCR. Derick founded a successful startup named Synthesis and also spent over 10 years working at Microsoft.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

What does it take to be a successful organization in today’s fast-moving environment?

Most of us would agree you need:

• An understanding of customer needs
• Deep knowledge about the markets in which you operate
• The agility to rapidly respond to change
• The capacity to quickly turn an idea into a product and get it to your customers

However, there are a number of misconceptions that enter the conversation – and can lead your team astray, costing you time, money, and opportunities.

Get a copy of the CTO’s technology assessment checklist Download the Checklist >>

Technology is the fuel

Ultimately, you need to be able to move ideas through the development pipeline, adjusting as the landscape shifts, to get products and services to market with as much velocity as possible.

We cannot overstate this enough: Time to market is critical to profitability.

Given those requirements, one of the first things to evaluate in a business is whether the technology in place is optimized to turn ideas into products. Then, once that question is answered, is that technology set up and optimized to put those products into the hands of customers.

To assess this, we ask things like:

• Are the systems facilitating a speedy, efficient development process?
• Or are the systems slowing down processes, creating inefficiencies, and ultimately leading to missed opportunities for revenue generation and market dominance?

For many companies, the latter scenario is all too familiar. And this is often due to misconceptions common among some executives, which, end up inhibiting their organizations from finding business success through sound strategic technology planning.

Faulty reasoning leads to missed opportunities

Below are three examples of faulty reasoning that can stop success in its tracks:

“We already have lots of technology systems in place, so we’re okay.”

It’s not as if businesses today come to us still recording information with pencil and paper, filing it away in card catalogs. Most mature organizations leverage an incredible array of technology solutions and infrastructure across their business. 

But that, right there, is part of the problem.

The nature of historic technology investments and planning has resulted in the implementation of islands of technology that were never designed to work together, or even communicate with one another. Data sits stagnant in vertical silos, instead of being brought together for an integrated, 360-degree view of the business. 

And all of this means, the technology strategy isn’t being driven by one overarching goal to bring products and services to market…and is actually hampering those efforts.

We recently worked with one client who leveraged 21 different databases, ranging from Excel spreadsheets to far more complex systems. Each included some amount of customer data, but like many other organizations, they were disconnected and fragmented.

This organization didn’t need more technology systems. What they needed was a single source of truth for their data.

It can be hard to transition away from legacy systems. But success in today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape demands the ability to have a 360-degree view of the data.

“If we make a substantial investment, we won’t have to think about this problem again.”

A lot of companies understand their current technology landscape is not fit for purpose, but they think about tech investments in the same way that they think about investing in new facilities or other capital equipment.

They want to know:

• How much it’s going to cost
• How long it will take
• Over how many years the expense should be amortized

And then they want to be finished so they can move on to the next thing on the to-do list.

But that’s simply not how technology works. Executives need to understand they’re embarking on a journey that, for better or worse, has no end.

Technology platforms require a continuous stream of upgrades and new capabilities – often driven by customer demand – to keep generating value over time. Data technologies are constantly changing, and the information available and analyses you can conduct with it are constantly improving.

Your digital capabilities need to keep improving too. Because as they do, your enterprise’s revenue, profit, and competitive advantage will only increase.

There is a lifecycle to technology and digital products that you need to understand, and it’s different from the lifecycle of a factory. Which means you also need to understand that there’s also a different way to approach your technology budget and planning process. One which requires integrating digital capabilities into everything you do.

While you can’t just write one check and be done, the value you can generate over time far exceeds what a simple capital investment might provide.

“We’re not a technology company, so none of this matters.”

This is the biggest misconception of all. We are ALL digital companies today.

Therefore, we must all leverage technology capabilities to bring products and services to market faster and more successfully.

We talk to customers every day about how organizations need a digital platform strategy, because no industry, no business, no nonprofit is exempt from the forces of the customer and their needs.

Without the right technology strategy underpinning a company’s digital ambitions, you’ll find your organization’s product development lifecycle growing longer and longer, and success metrics falling faster and faster.

On top of which, you’ll see new entrants to your markets stealing customers whose needs have evolved beyond your enterprise’s ability to meet them.

Your business relies on the truth

Do any of these misconceptions ring true in your organization? It may be a sign that your company could use help with your technology strategy — whether you think of yourself as a tech organization or not. The good news about technology? It’s never too late to employ today’s best practices and capabilities to meet your overarching business goals.

Have you let too much time pass since you last assessed your technology plan? Drop us a line and we’ll set up a chat.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

But changing your message isn’t always the answer. Sometimes the key is in your delivery.

If you’re relying on tactics that take advantage of only one or two of the channels your audience consumes, there’s a chance that when the unexpected strikes, these tactics will fall short of their overarching objectives. If this has happened to you, then you may be wondering—what now?

One solution is to use integrated communications to preserve your key messages and adapt them for a variety of channels to surround your audience where they are. Essentially, you’re telling the same story through a number of different media types to break through the clutter and make your brand ever-present in the eyes and ears of your audience.

Not only does an integrated marketing strategy give you more chances to be seen, but it also allows you to reach members of your audience multiple times to make it difficult—or even impossible—to tune out what you have to say. The results are increased engagement, heightened brand recognition and, if your messages are compelling, improved sales.

At Mod Op, integrated marketing allows us to tell your story in a more personal and meaningful way. It even gives us the space to get creative in solving your challenges and accomplishing your goals. These campaigns don’t just get seen; they make the headlines. This was certainly the case when we partnered with the United Government of Wyandotte County, Kansas to launch a massive, public awareness campaign that led to over 56,000 people receiving their COVID-19 vaccine by June 2021.

When COVID-19 first hit the United States in March 2020, Mod Op was already working with the Unified Government on a strategic communications program. Like many municipal organizations, the Unified Government received hundreds of questions flooding in from both the community and the press in the Kansas City area.

“For a lot of the public information officers, COVID completely changed their job description,” says Mod Op Public Relations Manager Sally Behringer. “They went from a job where they might get a media inquiry maybe once a week to a daily barrage of, ‘Has anybody died yet?’”

With such a sharp spike in the demand for communications, the Unified Government was under pressure to mobilize enough messaging to maintain a positive relationship with their stakeholders and roll out their new health policies. They turned to Mod Op for help in developing an integrated marketing campaign that would bridge the gaps in their communications strategy.

As Behringer led the charge on the public relations front, our creative and paid media  team designed outdoor signage, radio and television spots, and direct mail, both in English and Spanish, encouraging the people of Wyandotte County to stay home, wear masks and get their vaccine to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We took advantage of every communications channel available to us, including newspapers, social media and sporting events, to reach out to a much wider audience and make our message unavoidable. Throughout the campaign, we featured local faces to foster a deeper and more meaningful connection between the Unified Government and the community.

“It’d be difficult to go anywhere and not see some sort of COVID-19 messaging from the health department,” says Mod Op Account Director Aaron Gilbertie. “You walked to the bus; you saw a vinyl wrap on the bus. You got on the bus; it was on a 15 second audio that ran at every stop. You drove anywhere; you saw billboards.”

The campaign was a huge success. As of June 2nd, health officials have administered more than 100,000 doses of the vaccine at Wyandotte County’s vaccination facility, and fewer than 300 county residents have died from the disease. The campaign was featured by several local news outlets, including KSHB, Wyandotte Daily! and The Kansas City Star.

Whether you’re gearing up for your next product launch or just want day-to-day messaging that resonates, consider how you can use integrated communications to be everywhere your audience turns. You’ll make your presence known, and, more importantly, you’ll see significant returns on your investment, regardless of your budget.

Surrounding audiences with compelling marketing messages is what we do everyday. Click here to learn more about our services.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that, this year, we received the CMA Award for Best Overall Design in Digital for our exceptional work on the relaunch of Belvedere Vodka’s website.

Mod Op and Belvedere have worked together since 2015. As an agency, we’ve always strived to improve and innovate the work that we do with new, disruptive, creative solutions that give our clients a competitive edge.

As we continued to work closely with Belvedere, we saw an opportunity to optimize their site and enhance the user experience to better align with their position as an organic vodka that’s “Made With Nature.” Not only would the site tell a more meaningful and immersive brand story, but it would do so in a way that reflected the premium look and feel that defines Belvedere Vodka.

With these ambitions in mind, we began the project to relaunch the Belvedere website with goals of capturing more traffic, captivating their audience and converting more users into customers.

Optimizing, redesigning and relaunching Belvedere’s website was no small undertaking. Pulling experts from across a wide range of disciplines, we put together a team of designers, developers, QA specialists, content authors, SEO strategists, copywriters and analysts that worked together to streamline the site design and enhance the visual experience so we could improve the user journey.

We decided to build the new website using a headless Drupal, react-based interface that connects to a custom CMS to optimize performance. And, instead of designing the site as a group of pages, we broke each page into individual modules, which can be repurposed and rearranged for future content. The result is a simple design that is not only more flexible, but also more sustainable, allowing Belvedere to put out new content with a shorter time to market and no need to invest more in their site design.

A beautiful design calls for captivating visuals. We integrated gorgeous, full-screen video content, photography, micro animations and seamless scrolling into the site’s visual design to delight the user and immerse them deeply into the ebb and flow of nature. Along with these visuals, we crafted tasteful, sophisticated, SEO-optimized messaging that tells the unique story of Belvedere, a fire-distilled, organic vodka made with Polish rye and purified water.

Finally, we added new, engaging features to Belvedere’s website to give the site utility and direct more visitors into the content funnel. We worked with a third party to integrate a new app called the “Virtual Mixologist,” allowing users to search for organic cocktails for specific occasions or for recipes that include the ingredients they have at home. We also added new “occasions” to the site, pages that feature cocktail recipes for a specific season, meal or celebration, allowing visitors to quickly find the cocktail recipes they need while linking them directly to the product.

The site relaunched in September 2020, fulfilling every one of our expectations. With massively improved performance and faster load times.

The new site also captured much deeper engagement with Belvedere’s audience. Users spent significantly more time per page view and explored more pages per visit. And with more pathways for visitors to become customers, the site delivers a continuous return on Belvedere’s investment.

Building innovative brands is what we do. Let’s work together to tell your story.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

Most companies don’t lack for good ideas for improving customers’ experiences and satisfaction with their digital products or services. But often there are hurdles, communication errors, and other obstacles that block the translation of those ideas into successful implementations of product strategy.

As a leader, how can you ensure that your product reaches the finish line successfully?

Here are five ways CEOs and other leaders can ensure their strategies are driven through to successful execution.

Let nothing come between you and your customer – including your company

Many companies rely on internal team members to serve as internal translators of their customer’s needs and pain points. Whether that be salespeople or marketers or even founders and executives – yes, any number of these employee groups can gather great insight. However, nothing can substitute the direct feedback from your customers and prospects on their ever-changing needs.

Conducting regular surveys and interviews is a good place to start. Make sure to address both general pain points and needs and specific queries regarding your products and the competition. In doing this, you equip your product and technology teams with key insights that feed the product implementation roadmap.

One especially useful approach is to seek understanding about all customers’ workflow, or what some marketers might call the customer or buying journey. What do they do just before, during and after they use your product? This helps you understand why customers make the choices they do – which is key to product innovation.

Present a clear and focused product strategy

Once you’ve identified and understood your customers’ needs and pain points, it’s time to distill a strategy with a clear, realistic number of elements. Stick to half a dozen or less – anything more than that will likely result in your company’s efforts being too divided and scattershot to drive the results you are looking for.

It is often best to start with a positioning statement that aligns the idea with business goals, measured by key performance indicators (KPIs). Then make sure the product team aligns every feature to support that positioning statement and its goals.

Separate the product from the technology

There are a number of popular phrases in the technology world that can lead people to think that speed is the way to product quality. Words such as “agile,” “nimble” and “failing fast” may be applicable in some instances, but may cause more harm than good. As a result, we often see leaders trying to be “agile” but end up throwing money and resources into concepts that are half-baked, ineffective or too expensive to do well quickly.

Keep in mind that the technology is not the end result – it’s what the technology makes possible for the end customer that establishes the need for your product!

Think about what you are trying to do and use as few technology resources as possible to get it in front of your customer. Once you start to see engagement, then build the technology.

Manage your product team’s priorities

Once you have your customer pain points identified and a focused product strategy, it’s important to stay focused. In fact, the most important thing you can do for your product organization at this time is to help them manage priorities and remain focused on the core problem.

Be brutal about eliminating non-performing products. In short, keeping people in the product organization from feeling they are constantly taking on new initiatives without offloading other, less important tasks is one of the most important things a CEO can do.

Ensure stakeholder collaboration

Does your organization’s product team operate in a silo? Do your marketing and sales leaders participate in product ideation? Do they feel involved in the process and bought in to the results? If you see aspects of silo behavior it is important to encourage cross-functional stakeholder engagement.

Interested in product strategy and execution? Here are some additional insights from our team that you may find helpful:

• Use “design thinking” like a tech giant
• Looking back from the future
• Transforming? Be sure to synchronize product, platform, and brands

Of course, you can always let us know if you’d like to set up a chat.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

The overall goal of these updates is to improve Google’s ability to provide searchers with content they can trust, which involves a better understanding of what a searcher is looking for and enhanced recognition of the quality of content.

Google released core updates last year. In this two-part blog post, I’d like to share some insight on significant changes implemented during these two updates and how you can adapt your digital marketing strategy to complement them. In this first part, we’ll focus on the update’s emphasis on content relevancy and the principle of E-A-T.

Content Relevancy

The primary change of the May 2020 update had to do with content relevancy and Google’s ability to recognize it. Google is now better able to determine how relevant and useful any given piece of content is.

If your content was more relevant in May 2020 than it was in January 2020, you’re in luck, and your site probably improved in search engine results. However, if you have outdated content, your website most likely dropped in Google rankings post-update. We recommend clients focus more attention on blogging as a natural way to continually post timely content to their sites, thus improving Google’s perception of their content relevancy. You may find a few handy tips on doing so in this article about refining your blog.

This particular upgrade emphasizes the importance of revising old content, as well as publishing new, to keep your information accurate and your digital marketing strategy current. When your marketing includes relevant content, Google will recognize it as useful for searchers and rank it higher in search engine results.

E-A-T

Google uses the abbreviation E-A-T to discuss expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. These qualities are crucial in Google’s ranking algorithms, and both the January and May updates focused on E-A-T.

E-A-T connects to many aspects of your business, including your content and brand. It’s especially critical to work on your E-A-T if your industry is YMYL or Your Money or Your Life. YMYL websites are medical, legal or financial sites, any site that helps its users make important decisions and any site that sells products or processes credit card payments, which is pertinent for all eCom focused sites.

YMYL sites understandably need to be trustworthy. After all, you wouldn’t want medical advice from someone not licensed or knowledgeable enough to give it. If you do run a reputable site, you want to make sure Google recognizes it as such. A digital marketing agency like ours can help you refine your brand in order to boost your E-A-T. This post about how we rebranded the Oxygen channel is a great example of how we’ve improved a client’s E-A-T in the past.

Here at Mod Op, we can help optimize your content and your E-A-T as two means of modernizing your SEO strategy, and those are just the beginning. Next month, in the second half of this analysis, I’ll cover three more areas that Google’s recent updates address. In the meantime, you can learn more about Mod Op’s SEO and other technology services here.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

Most business leaders today know the word “platform” has morphed beyond its traditional Oxford English Dictionary definition as either “a raised level surface on which people or things can stand” or “the declared policy of a political party or group.” When a recent U.S. president got “de-platformed,” most of us understood that meant he was kicked off Twitter and other major social media websites.

But fewer executives fully understand what the term means in the business world, or why they might need one. Searches for the phrase “digital platform” hit a new peak last September, with the term doubling in interest since October 2019, according to Google Trends.

To help you more effectively incorporate these key insights into strategic conversations, we first need to define what is meant by a “digital platform”, and then discuss how to establish a digital platform strategy and why you need to adopt a platform mindset to be successful in today’s digital economy.

What do we mean by ‘digital platform’?

Think of it like an ecosystem: A digital platform is a combination of culture, services, data and technology upon which additional innovation and value can be rapidly and efficiently delivered.

Digital platforms can add value by enabling service innovation for customers and clients, fostering more efficient ways of working, revealing new insights from operational data – or likely a combination of all three.

A recent Deloitte study on the topic describes four categories of digital platforms:

Business platforms can embrace any combination of these categories. But what’s common is a mindset that values creating an environment in which customers can learn about and consume your products and services. Companies like Salesforce build platform businesses that enable customers and partners to create additional value on top of their platform.

Other organizations like Netflix and Uber use a platform strategy to accelerate internal delivery of services and value to consumers. In both cases the necessary ingredients for a successful digital platform approach remain the same.

Successful adoption of a digital platform business model requires:

• An adaptable and problem-solving staff
• Clarity regarding the core set of services shared across teams and organizations
• Understanding of the centrality and importance of data as the lifeblood asset of the company
• An integrated, scalable, agile and reliable technology foundation

Digital platforms – the basics

The graphic below shows the elements that comprise many modern digital platforms. These models are best read from the bottom up: User profile data, web content and other data power a series of services, which drive front-end business applications for the user.

These applications and services are presented via a common user interface.

Why growth depends on a digital platform strategy

Organizations with platform-based business models have a number of inherent advantages over organizations with a more traditional structure and operating model. Product development is typically faster because building on top of shared platform services accelerates implementation cycles. It also accelerates the speed which new services and features can be released based on real customer evidence and feedback.

Decision-making is also faster using a platform approach over traditional, hierarchically governed organizations. Central is the notion of continuous improvement based on a recurring feedback loop:

Capturing a growing share of revenue enables more aggressive reinvestment in underlying platform capabilities, which reinforces the built-in advantage of the positive digital platform feedback loop. Organizations that optimize and build on these platform-enabled feedback processes tend to pull away at an increasing rate from their more traditional competitors.

Adopting a digital platform culture

Platforms differ from traditional business models by emphasizing horizontal integration of data, processes and services across organizational boundaries. Traditional business models depend on hierarchical decision-making and emphasize specialization and ownership within functionally distinct organizational boundaries.

Platform-based approaches typically require a flatter organization with networked collaboration and decision-making processes that focus on responsiveness by pushing decision-making authority closer to the point of engagement with the customer or client.

The imperative to push decision making away from traditional hierarchical leadership roles toward empowered and enabled members of staff places a premium on adaptability, higher level problem solving and analytical skills.

Successful digital platform organizations hire talent that can flex between different roles and can continuously develop new skills and capabilities. These organization focus on empowering staff to make decisions based on data with readily available access to the data and required analytical tools.

Data: The lifeblood of digital platform-based business models

Accurate, real or near real-time operational data is the foundation of fast, precise decision making. It all leads to better product and service designs, and continuous improvement in business operations efficiency.

Platform-based businesses invest heavily in the technical data landscapes that provide a 360-degree view of the business and are able to ingest, process and distribute data as efficiently as possible to the staff and systems driving the business forward.

Continuous, ongoing Investment in the analytics tools required to use data to inform business decisions is critical.

Creating standard services for your business platform

One of the keys to driving growth with a platform business model is the ability to identify common processes across the organization and to turn these into shared automated services within the technical landscape.

The creation of a set of common shared platform services fosters two significant benefits for the organization.

• Benefit 1: Decision-making and transactional friction is dramatically reduced by adopting standard service definitions.
• Benefit 2: Time-to-market to introduce new products and services is radically improved by building new capabilities from a reusable set of “Lego” building blocks.

Technology basics for powering a digital platform business

Platform-based businesses almost always base their technical architectures on modern cloud-based, scalable design and operating principles. The elastic nature of cloud-based architectures and the ease with which integrated data landscapes can be provisioned and operated makes these the optimal environments for delivery and management of digital platform services.

Some of the world’s largest and most successful platform companies – including Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Spotify – make much of their platform capabilities available via open-source code. Organizations embarking on building out platform-based technical infrastructures can accelerate their journey by reusing the building blocks made freely available by these companies and others.

Building these technical platform capabilities from scratch often does not make sense for an organization.

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of very sophisticated and fully managed platform services available from the main cloud platform providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform. Adoption of a technical architecture and landscape based on these fully managed services radically reduce an organization’s need to invest in technical operating capabilities and the associated fixed in-house costs.

The advantages of developing a digital platform business model are increasingly clear to all types of businesses and organizations who are committed to growth, innovation, and defining the future for their customers and marketplaces. Success depends on developing the organizational rigor and internal operating discipline to embrace required change and effectively develop and execute an enterprise-wide platform approach.

Wondering how can you apply the thinking behind digital platforms for your enterprise? Let us know if you’d like to chat further.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

Effective deployment and use of digital tools and services underpins the success of every organization today. But while the right technology can give you a competitive advantage, most organizations find it difficult to keep up with the sheer pace of technology change. Finding the appropriate level of investment in digital tools, skills, and processes is among the most pressing and challenging issues for today’s leadership teams. These challenges can be faced head-on and often overcome by conducting a thorough technology assessment.

Regular technology assessments ensure continued strategic alignment between business strategy and digital investments. When undertaken effectively, a technology assessment will:

• Improve business operations
• Enhance customer service
• Reduce time-to-market for new products and services and, most critically
• Ensure your organization’s capabilities enable future growth and mission objectives

When should you conduct a technology assessment?

Frequently reviewing your technology landscape will allow you to track progress in aligning your capabilities to the evolving needs of your operating model. And by regularly assessing technology capabilities, you’ll maintain a clear investment roadmap that aligns the stakeholders and partners who drive and benefit from those investments.

Other signs that it’s time to perform a strategic technology assessment include:

• When considering a major technology investment
• When your business is experiencing significant, above-normal growth
• When market dynamics change due to disruptive use of digital strategies by competitors

There are three steps to a typical technology assessment. Let’s talk about them:

1. Analyze Your Current Technology State

As with any decision-making process, there has to be an information gathering and analysis of data. It doesn’t have to be a cumbersome and painstaking process. If done right, the analysis can be quick and effective.

While you can try to do this step on your own, experience tells us that you’re likely to get blinded by two factors: confirmation bias and, if you’re not a CTO, lack of experience. Enlisting outside help is common for many organizations.

It’s essential that these technology assessment interviews are conducted by an experienced CTO with the deep operational experience needed to ask the right questions and use insight to separate the aspirational from the actual. An outside perspective also helps keep things objective, so confirmation bias doesn’t creep in — where the search becomes only for the information we want to find.

In these assessments, you’ll also want to review data architecture and management practice, development capabilities and technology delivery processes, compliance processes, licensing and 3rd party services portfolio, and operational playbooks and processes..

When this step of the technology assessment is complete, you’ll have a clear picture of the baseline capabilities along with a better understanding of potential gaps between what was expected versus what’s actually there in terms of people, process and technology.

2. Diagnose Your Technology Needs

With the analysis complete, it’s time to map the current-state portfolio of capabilities to strategic business and market growth objectives. This allows you to prioritize among the various technology implementation options and create a phased schedule for any investments.

From there, the next step will be to identify gaps or misalignment in capabilities, technology operating plans, service portfolios, technical architecture and platform strategies.

Once the diagnostic phase is wrapped, you should have an understanding of where the opportunities lie and where you may have potential gaps in technology capabilities.

3. Align Your Technology Plan

The alignment phase is where it all comes together. In this phase, you’ll need to develop a plan to address gaps likely to impact growth or undermine investment hypotheses, including:

• Forward-looking viability
• True ability to scale
• Compliance
• Governance
• Security
• Other identified risks

If you work with a team like Mod Op Strategic Consulting, this is the stage where you’ll get a detailed report that includes a roadmap for practical, risk-mitigated, technology capability enhancement. If you’re attempting this on your own, you’ll want to make a report so you can share it with your team and plan next steps.

Upon completion of the three technology assessment phases, you should have a 360-degree view of your technology capabilities from the perspective of:

• Hardware
• Software
• Networking
• Data
• People and processes

All with clear recommendations for mitigations and other changes needed.

Ready to Schedule Your Technology Assessment?

Over the last several years Mod Op Strategic Consulting (Mod Op Strategic Consulting) has led technology assessments for dozens of clients. With these quick and effective technology assessments, led by our CTO, we take care of each phase resulting in a comprehensive blueprint to help you align your business strategy with your digital investments.

If you’re due for a technology assessment, grab a copy of our technology assessment checklist, and reach out to our team for a free consultation call.

TAKE A DIGITAL MATURITY EVALUATION

If you’ve spent any time in PR, you’ve heard an executive vice president or two reminisce about the days of writing releases on typewriters and clipping media hits by hand. Those anecdotes, better than anything else, showcase just how much the discipline has evolved over the last few decades. My point is that things are constantly changing. But one thing that has remained the same is the need to get high-quality coverage for clients. You’ve distributed releases and secured articles, but have you thought about podcasts?

An intro to podcasts
Since their rise to popularity in the early 2000s, podcasts have been on the up and up. According to insights from Nielsen, the podcast audience in the United States is projected to double by 2023. This portable, on-demand option is becoming the preferred method of entertainment and catching up on current events during long commutes to and from the workplace. Although many have moved to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the data shows that smart speakers are also being widely used for listening.

Leveraging podcasts for PR
The beauty of podcasts is that they can be used in a variety of ways. PR practitioners can help secure guest spots or even create a client-branded show.

Before trying to create a podcast, consider setting up interviews on industry-leading shows. Because existing channels are likely to already have their set target audience, you can focus on the topic at hand and building awareness for your brand, not for the podcast itself. Capitalize on the already curated audience as well as the trusted host, while also getting your message out there. Here, the emphasis is credibility. Unlike a press release which might be viewed as bias, an interview or article featuring your company gives weight to your brand by having a trusted authority figure provide validation. The same concept applies with podcasts.

Creating your own podcast and building an audience can help establish your company as a thought leader in your desired industry. This takes the opportunity from earned to owned. In this case, you have all the power when it comes to creating and attracting an audience, selecting topics for each episode and discussing details specific to your company. This also puts the company, specifically the host, in a position to be a thought leader and feature other well-known thought leaders on the show.

After the interview
After securing an interview on a podcast, or even starting your own, don’t just leave it at that. Leverage it wherever possible. Share the link on your own social channels or reshare posts from the podcast’s pages and encourage followers to take a listen. This way, you’re cross-promoting and reaching a wider audience. If it makes sense, link to the podcast on your website so potential customers can feel confident in your expertise.

Lastly, use it as part of your next podcast pitch. Mentioning another podcast in a pitch and providing a link to listen helps the host understand what you’ve discussed before, your interview style and what your area of expertise is.

Yes, PR has come a long way, and is still changing, so don’t get left behind. Stay ahead of the curve. Seek out new and relevant opportunities for your company, understand where your audience is and how they can be reached, and partner with a skilled agency to ensure you’re not neglecting your target audience.