Organizations should begin by first discovering what they really care about, then measure it with a custom set of KPIs evolved internally so as to help the business operate better and ultimately serve their customers and audiences more effectively.
While I believe in the ultimate value arising from various external Web analytics frameworks in making sense of internal and external information within an organization, its fairly complicated to implement convergence analytics in the enterprise and any implementation ought to be born out of an organization’s own internal and external data work and experiences. As organizations get their feet wet trying to implement convergence, they can start moving toward an externally sourced service or services that is offered by the various enterprise business services consulting from an informed perspective, as needed.
Figure 1: Marketing Clouds – TitaniumFire.com
I know it may be tempting to some to jump ahead and start working with services and external frameworks provided by the various marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and Adobe, to name some of the main players that promise to correlate data captured from social media and overlay it with jumbled up business data and metrics compiled from other systems in the enterprise. What businesses really need is to growth hack their convergence analytics internally so they can develop their own viewpoint and solutions that will work (for that business).
The ultimate purpose of convergence should be to integrate internal and external service offerings that are blended into one system that can serve all parts of the enterprise and turns data into petro fuel that powers much better decision-making. After all, should any number of external cloud enterprise intelligence vendor based initiatives fail to deliver the expected results, the organization just doesn’t stand still, it moves backward just as the rest of its competitors are continuing to move forward with their own integrations.
Organic Growth and the Blue Man Group
While working on this article I recalled a recent conversation I had with someone working for the popular Blue Man Group (BMG) about how the BMG came into being. Blue Man Group is known for growing their performance style organically (from within) through their own experiences and style. Fascinated by their model for success (which is similar to the way I teach), I looked around for articles about BMG to find out more about how the group did it.
Blue Man Group photo published at socialtext.com
“1990: Blue Man Group makes its Chicago debut as a special guest on Milly’s Orchid Show at Park West. The Tribune’s Rick Kogan calls them ‘an intriguing three-man performance art gang from New York that, as best we can figure out, does some amazing things with paints, music, food and other stuff.'”
Source: Chicago Tribune
I also cited the Blue Man Group on my WebMetricsGuru the other day because I am building out new programs using that approach, which I think is the best model to build out of, period. I think the idea of growing and growth hacking analytics from within would work in any business and it is better to start the process by learning what a business really cares about. For example, if a business really cares about acquiring more customers to their restaurant chain, then lets figure out if this is what they really care about and how they would they measure this, along with what to do with the data.
Specifically, as an analyst, it makes sense to treat key performance indicators (KPIs) (those internally agreed upon measures that tell us how our business is doing) as measures that are evolve organically in organizations, bubbling up, much as Blue Man Group evolved their unique performance art.
To summarize this article, I believe organizations should begin by first discovering what they really care about, then measure it with a custom set of KPIs evolved internally so as to help the business operate better and ultimately serve their customers and audiences more effectively.
