Other Ingredients

Having expensive pieces of hardware and software surely ain’t going to turn anyone’s enterprise around. There are a set of key ingredients that are to be seen in tandem with the Enterprise Marketing Solution you are considering to invest in, the absense of these elements will surely have adverse impact on your investment sooner or later.

The following section covers a few points (actually there are quite a lot to consider), the idea of posting the following is to give you idea of what all to be considered to ensure we do not end up making a Myopic decision in procuring a Marketing Management/Automation Solution.

[A] The software world and the associated business results have started seeing the light at end of the tunnel. The challenges around system integration and the pains  around it are being addressed by SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), please do ensure the solution you are considering to invest in has a roadmap for SOA readiness

[B] All of us would agree that quality of the data we have access to is not as good as we want it to be. Rings a bell? Well, lets not try to turn this world a perfect place but work with its constraints productively. Like World, Data will NEVER be perfect. Its totally foolish to wait till Data gets perfect. Having said that, its essential the solution that is being considered by you has capability to deal with Inadequacies and Anomalies posed by your underlying Customer Data.

[C] Its importantant to remember your current investments on ETL/Storage et al have been sized in an appropriate manner and ofcourse accordingly licensed. So, you may not necessarily be able to blindly leverage those investments for your Marketing Automation programme. Please do a dip stick and ensure your investments can be used (if at all) and avoid the last minute surprises of solution not going live.

[D] Every vendors says Integration is easy as part of their offering – This aspect is easier said that done! It is essential you find out how integration of the new solution you are planning to procure for Marketing Management can integrate with your enterprise to source data as well as provide data to Channels systems for processing.

[E] Last but not the lease, evaluate the Security, Metadata, Scalability and User Management of the Solution you are planning to invest in very throughly..