Your data is the core asset empowering you to react and launch new customer experiences, therefore it is crucial to ensure it is readily available and easy to access in a way that enables you to change paths and build new optimized and personal digital experiences at lightning speed. Instant access to real-time data will make your business more resilient.
In this blog, I’ll show you how to understand if your data is in an Enterprise or Experience state, and I'll explain why this is essential to empower your digital team to make a stronger contribution to the growing success of your business.
What does it mean when we talk about data in an Enterprise state?
Your organization likely handles tons of data across various systems: your product managers working in the PIM/PLM area, your distributors updating shipping information in the WMS or OMS, and your marketing and sales team in the CRM. This data is in an Enterprise state, and it is vital to the business that each system performs the tasks it is set to handle, servicing its users with a customized user interface to enable them to handle their workload efficiently.
The individual solutions are systems of record, they hold and process the single source of truth for most of the data. Data residing in these kinds of solutions is residing in an Enterprise state and is often characterized by a few different parameters.
- There are processes in place for how the data is updated and who can work with the data.
- The data might need to be verified by multiple separate roles following an intricate approval schema.
- Data records and all the versions may need to be stored for a long time, up to several years or even decades.
- Storing options can be limited to on-premises physical servers due to software restrictions or data regulations within the company.
The above parameters are vital to the enterprise, it keeps the data safe and correct, it helps the company stay out of legal issues and it makes sure the core parts of the organization function correctly.
How can data in an Enterprise state hinder your business?
This way of storing data also slows the data down and using the data outside the core application is harder and it is not scaled for servicing external requests when building customer-facing applications.
Utilizing enterprise state data outside its core habitat normally requires setting up a lot of various services in a cloud or on-premises environment and then building costly and time-consuming integrations from all the data sources needed into your new platform.
Problems often arise when trying to join data from different systems together because the data has not been modeled in the same way. You first must find the least common denominator between the systems and then you only integrate that specific data, omitting and discarding a lot of vital data from some systems.
You would also need to set up indexing for the data as well as offload it through a Content Delivery Network so that you can deliver your data fast to the different applications needing it. You must ask yourself if building a solution like this really is part of your core business and whether “build” really is better than “buy” in this scenario?
I have seen a few different organizations struggling with these kinds of problems and while most of them managed to gather their data in a data lake or similar, only some of them were able to find good solutions for making the data available outside of the company, normally by setting up a GraphQL endpoint for developers to explore and get lost in, something I wrote about in this article; How to stop overloading your developers with data when building digital experiences.
Take your data to the next level in an Experience state
When building applications or experiences that need to utilize this locked-in corporate data, you need to move it to another level, the Experience state.
In the Experience state, the data is fast, and easy to unify, segment, filter, and distribute using simple tools that your digital team has access to at their fingertips. You should be able to create application-specific data endpoints only containing the data needed in a matter of minutes and not days or weeks, WITHOUT lengthy integrations!
Companies that know their customers are tailoring specific experiences to keep their attention - Take Cartier as an example: with the recent impact of the pandemic on their store open times, they were inspired to create a wedding app designed to give their clients a unique online guided ring-buying experience. This new unified and personal experience kept them connected to their customers and they were able to go from idea to launch in just about five weeks. See the full use case here.
By layering Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform over your existing tech stack, you can easily unlock and join together your cCDP with product and context data, no matter what model they come from, and create new and exciting experiences using the most relevant content. Future-proof your brand by delivering the strongest customer experience.
When you make the data more accessible your digital team will become more creative and dare to try out new things. It doesn’t matter if it is a new kind of custom-built front-end experience or if the task is to provide a combination of unified data to a third-party application that you want to try out, having the data easily accessible in an experience state makes it an easy task to perform, and this will foster innovation in the end because it takes shorter time and there is less risk involved.
Summary
Our customers are a testament to the innovation power created by the Occtoo Experience Data Platform. One example is MQ Marqet, a Swedish fashion retailer, that just went live with the first phase of interactive screens in their stores. The Experience data provided for these screens is all handled by Occtoo and distributed in the correct format needed for that specific implementation. In a project like this, you would normally plan a couple of weeks or even months for integrations. With Occtoo’s API MQ Marqet had all the product data they needed to create the experience in days; talk about speed-of-innovation!
At Occtoo we want to democratize the access to data within organisations by offering a tool that allows digital teams to deliver customized Experience data to any front-end. Enabling developers by getting easier access to data to build fantastic experiences!
Book a demo with our team today to discover how Occtoo can make your innovation easier.
