Breaking Down The Data Silos

Satisfying Rising Customer Expectations Requires Companies To Break Down The Silos That Hold Their Data

The need to break down silos in organisations dominated the first day at the Adobe Summit EMEA in London.

Opening the event, Adobe’s general manager digital marketing, Brad Rencher, talked about the need to match rising customer expectations. This is done, he argued, by listening to customer signals, predicting the required experience, assembling that experience and then delivering it, all in a matter of milliseconds. The problem with listening to the signals is that all the data tends to be held in silos.

“We don’t just need to break down the silos the data is held in,” he said, “we need to have it ready for real-time use. Data needs to be able to move freely through the system.”

In a later session John Watton, senior director – EMEA marketing at digital marketing technology supplier Silverpop, talked about the need to have one database to capture customer actions when trying to personalise a customer’s experience on a website. “A single customer experience needs a single customer view,” he said.

Giles Richardson, data and analytics manager at RBS, also said that, for personalisation to work, it needed a targeting platform that could leverage all the data about customers. And he argued that the big challenge of the next few years will be what he called “data stitching”; tying together people’s experiences of a brand across multiple devices, which will inevitably mean eliminating silos based on platforms.