The Rise of Employee Self-Service Data – and IT’s New Role

We’ve all heard it: the era of big data is upon us. Adapt or die.

Never before has data been more important in business. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Google and others are doing remarkable things with troves of consumer, user and employee information. How do they do it?

The fact of the matter is: organizations are struggling to exploit the data on hand to drive sales and customer loyalty. There seems to be no end to the data-driven possibilities. Sure, the above are powerhouse brands, but they don’t have to be the exception to the employee self-service data rule.

What’s taking so long?

The brands that are doing it right have armies of tech-savvy marketing analysts, sales operations and customer support that are developing and deploying new applications. These guys sit outside the IT organization.

For everyone else, there’s a fundamentally broken process that is putting a stronghold between IT and employee productivity: the need to formally sanction and grant access to information.

At a minimum, the resulting back-and-forth hinders innovation, which leads to lead missed revenue opportunities down the line. And, this all comes at a time when organizational agility is most critical.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to delve deeper into what I see as the key issue here: IT processes that simply aren’t keeping up with demands of the evolving business landscape.

I’ll take a look at the evolution of IT over the past 15 years to hopefully shed some light on what needs to change so companies can effectively take exploit technology to make better decisions, differentiate themselves from competition, gain customer loyalty and – most importantly – drive the bottom line.