December 4, 2002 - TDWI FlashPoint: Want to Increase
Usage of Your Data Warehouse? Market it!
By Cindi Howson
TDWI FLASHPOINT---December 4, 2002
Copyright 2002. The Data Warehousing Institute. All rights reserved
Many IT professionals overlook this important part of implementing a data warehouse. Afterall the users asked for it, why do you need market it to them? Because:
- Only some users asked for it; others don’t know what it is or that it’s coming
- the data warehouse is dynamic and with each change, there are new opportunities to leverage it
- The more effectively you market the data warehouse, the greater your return on investment
- As key stake holders know how the business benefits from the data warehouse, the easier it is to obtain funding for incremental improvements!
WHAT IS MARKETING?
What is marketing anyway? When I tell IT people I teach a course on marketing the data warehouse, they generally laugh and respond, “What’s to teach? Marketing means just say yes!” Well, not quite (that’s the sales person’s job! J). Marketing is really about getting us to build exactly what customers need, and getting our customers to use more of what we build. How do you do that?
Your best bet is to enlist the help of your internal marketing and/or communications department to develop a formal marketing plan for the data warehouse. A marketing plan contains the following component, some of which will overlap with your project plan:
- Situation Analysis, which covers your current situation, competitive analysis, and a strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats (SWOT) Analysis
- Marketing Mix, which involves the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. For most data warehouses, product and promotion are your most effective tools.
- Market Segments, which divide your customers and users into different groups. Your product and promotion should be tailored to each of these market segments
- Objectives, which includes how you will measure your marketing and project effectiveness. Ultimately, this may be ROI, but incrementally, it may be number of users trained, number of promotional efforts, number of queries run.
The data warehouse faces competition on many fronts. Your job is to identify the source of competion and know how the data warehouse is better. Users can access data from ERP systems, legacy reporting databases, spreadsheets, paper reports, or not at all. Why should users access the data warehouse rather than these competitive sources? A SWOT analysis can be an effective tool in discovering your strengths as well as low cost opportunities for improvement. It is also a necessary first step in understanding what exactly you will emphasize in your promotions.
Following is a sample SWOT Analysis:
Strengths: Common business definitions, global information, complete information, self-serve access, historical data
Weaknesses: data quality issues, slow queries, updated weekly
Opportunities: fixed reports with guaranteed response times
Threats: legacy reporting systems still used, custom reports against the ERP system expanding, some departments are implementing independent datamarts
Perfectionists at heart, many data warehouse and IT professionals tend to focus on the weaknesses of a SWOT; yet users often see the situation differently.
IT Perception: The data warehouse won’t be usable until all the data quality issues are solved!
User Reality: some data is better than no data, just tell me where it’s wrong.
IT Perception: Users want real-time data so the data warehouse is useless until updates are daily!
User reality: some users do need real-time, but if users are doing trend analysis with history and aggregates, then weekly updates are fine. Here, it’s important to understand both your product and your market segments.
Easy, it’s a data warehouse! No, not quite. First, data warehouse can be a dirty word in some organizations; call it a data mart, data staging, anything but a data warehouse that suggests expensive and years to build. Second, the data warehouse is only a piece of technology and not your end product. Your end product should emphasize the benefits NOT the features. Let’s take some world famous examples of products that emphasize benefits in their key messages:
Product Benefit Key Message
Ford Trucks Rugged enough to go anywhere Built tough
Calgon Bath Crystals Relaxation Calgon, take me away
Bounty Paper Towels Clean spills fast with less towels The quicker picker upper
Miller Lite Drink more beer Taste’s great, less filling
To develop a key message, you need to get used to translating the FEATURES of your data warehouse to the BENEFITS of your data warehouse.
|
FEATURE |
BUSINESS BENEFIT |
|
Global inventory data |
Reduce inventory holding costs |
|
Canned reports |
Immediate access to Key Performance Indicators |
|
Aggregate tables |
Fast answers |
|
Variance Analysis |
Stay on budget |
|
Populated by leading ETL tool |
Low ownership cost, consistent data quality |
|
Powered by leading hardware platform vendor |
Reliable |
Are you delivering a data warehouse? No, you are delivering a customer retention / inventory optimization / product profitability / etc. system! To reinforce the importance of naming the data warehouse, I will refer to the data warehouse as the Company Profitability System for the remainder of this article.
Many people equate marketing with promotion, but if you haven’t done the earlier analysis of the competion, SWOT, and product, your promotion may fail. When you promote the Company Profitability System with business users, promote the business benefits. Use a variety of media and use it often. This is another thing that IT people are uncomfortable with. “I told them about it once, why do I need to tell them again?”
Users need to hear the same messages multiple times before the benefits and usages will sink in. Do you ever see a commercial just once? No, you see and hear the same promotion on TV, magazines, newspaper and radio, repeatedly. Following are some useful media to effectively promote the Company Profitability System:
- Road shows: when companies first start building a Company Profitability System, many have corresponding information sessions about what is coming, when phase 1 will be available, and who will be trained first. The most successful “road shows” include business success stories and user testimonials on how the Company Profitability System had a measurable impact.
- Company newsletters: existing corporate newsletters are excellent media for getting out high level messages to a broad audience.
- Training classes: training sessions should go beyond the straight how-tos and address the benefits and business application of the data.
- Brown bag lunches: these provide a useful follow up to training and another opportunity to raise awareness about best practices, success stories, and benefits.
- Internal User Conferences: Just as RDBMS vendors, ETL vendors, and BI tool vendors host user conferences, so should you. Kick off the meeting with a review of the benefits, project mile stones, and a key success story. Then ask users to share tips and techniques on both the how-to in the BI tool as well as organizational issues in achieving measurable benefits.
- T-shirt days: Many project teams give away t-shirts, sunglasses, and other promotional items to reward staff for their accomplishments. As both a motivational technique and promotion opportunity, get the entire team to wear their give-away on mile-stone dates. This works particularly well if the t-shirt is brightly colored. Seeing 50 yellow-t-shirts in the company cafeteria will generate interest and curiosity about what’s new in the Company Profitability System.
- Intranet: The intranet and BI login screens are useful for promoting to existing users and keeping them informed; however, they are poor media for potential users. Potential users do not log on to the system, so they will never see these messages. Potential users are best reached through staff meetings and company news letters.
- Staff Meetings: Most departments and business units have regularly-scheduled staff meetings. Ask for 5-minutes on the agenda each quarter. A real sign of success is when the department invites you and requests 30 minutes!
Lastly, all this marketing strategy needs to be tailored by customer segment. Your customers are not just the users who log onto the system, they are the sponsors who fund the project, the decision maker who uses the data (but who may not log on), the gatekeepers who provide custom reports, plus a number of other stake holders and influencers. As we near the holiday shopping season, take the example of toys. My son wants a remote control truck (the user), I care about the quality and electronic noise (influencer and gate keeper), and Dad’s got the money (sponsor).
You determine your customer segments by differences in your potential user base. These differences could be based on job level, job function, computer literacy, new versus long-time employees, ERP vs non ERP users, etc.
Let’s look at two potential users and how the marketing is tailored to each.
|
Marketing |
Accountant |
VP Marketing |
|
Customer Segment |
Power user |
Casual user |
|
Product Features |
Ad hoc query access, 24 hour availability, financial data |
Drillable fixed reports, Pushed to palm pilot, product data |
|
Product Benefits |
Flexible |
Fast and easy |
|
Promotional media |
Training User Conferences Intranet |
Company newsletter Staff Meetings One-on-one conversation |
With tight budgets, a top priority for many data warehouse professionals is to improve the ROI without making technology investments. A sound marketing approach is a powerful way to increase usage with little cost. However, it does require a strong business orientation and a new way of talking with users, in their terms. As a first step, understand the competition to the data warehouse, as well as its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Get used to talking about the data warehouse in terms of the benefits, not just the platform, tools, and subject areas. Promote the benefits often, using a variety of media. Finally, understand the groups of existing users and potential users and tailor your strategy accordingly.
How do you market your data warehouse? I’d like to hear from you to incorporate your input as a case study in the TDWI course. Please contact me directly at cindihowson@askcindi.com
Cindi Howson is an independent consultant specializing in business intelligence tools. She is the author of the soon-to-be-published Business Objects: The Complete Reference and teaches “Marketing the Data Warehouse” at TDWI’s Night School. She can be reached at cindihowson@askcindi.com.