“One brand, one culture” needs one data ecosystem technology platform

People and brands are two of your company’s most valuable assets. Leaders recognise that aligning brands and culture has the power to attract, retain and engage employees, customers and stakeholders, driving business growth and raising brand value.

Yet in many organisations their value is not realised due to lack of alignment, between:

• The company’s and people’s purpose and values;
• Corporate, customer/product and employer brand strategies;
• Operational silos; and
• The promise the company is making to its employees, customers and stakeholders through its communications and their actual experiences.

Add an additional layer of complexity – the valuable asset that is data

Data – quantitative and qualitative, structured and unstructured, internal and external – is the opportunity to understand and strengthen the relationships between people, brands and business to unlock value and drive growth.

But lack of alignment serves to prevent easy and secure control of and access to data, from within and outside the organisation, and between employees, customers and stakeholders:

• People operate in silos with their own sets of data, technologies and systems that don’t talk to each other either within and outside of the organisation
• Many individuals don’t think data is their responsibility whereas data compliance, collaboration and capitalisation needs to be part of the culture and everyone’s responsibility
• Data compliance and security, privacy and permissions in using, sharing and integrating the data are not clear
• Exacerbated when combining legacy and new technologies, and M&A organisations
• There is no unified view of the customer or data of any entity, without expensive, time-consuming and risky stitching together of systems and data

Lack of alignment of people, brands and data mean that customer experiences are disjointed

As a result, customer, employee and stakeholder experiences are disjointed and not aligned to each other to ensure consistent delivery against the brand promise. A far cry from living up to people’s expectations of real-time, seamless, personalised, experiences that keep individual’s PII (personally identifiable information) safe.

Without one brand, one culture and a unified view of the customer or data of any entity, organisations cannot manage the complexity of experiences between its customers, employees and stakeholders to deliver consistently against the brand promise and business objectives.

A data ecosystem technology aligns people, brands and data

Organisations need to align people and brands to business strategy, and they need a data ecosystem technology that facilitates the data that informs and inspires people and brand relationships to drive business growth.

You can read more about aligning people and brands here and here.

But what about the data ecosystem? To address the challenges above, the data ecosystem technology needs to:

• Be user-friendly, easy to implement, use and scale by individuals and teams in-house in order to support a data-driven culture
• Enable people to share, integrate and analyse data within and between organisations, legacy and new technologies, accessing data across operational and technology silos
• Efficiently handle high volumes of structured and unstructured data gathered across experience touch-points, internal processes and KPIs (key performance indicators)
• Have in-built privacy and compliance controls that enable sharing of permissible data between individuals and organisations
• Provide a unified view of the customer or entity
• Facilitate data that is useable and updateable in real-time, capturing data related to each data point, with the capability to enable decision-making and action at point of interaction in real-time

Deliver the hyper-speed, hyper-secure, hyper-personalised experiences people want

In doing so, the combination of the strategy – aligning people and brands – and the technology – facilitating the data – enables organisations to deliver the hyper-speed, hyper-secure, hyper-personalised experiences that people expect and live up to the brand promise. Raising brand value and driving business growth.

Sound too good to be true? I’ve been fortunate to be working with transformative technology start-up Fl@World founders Michael & Kim McDonald and their data ecosystem technology, built upon years of experience in Tier One companies and Silicon Valley start-ups. Fl@World is designed to do this… and more…  solving the data problems that organisations face today in order to open up opportunities for the future. You can find out more here.