Introduction
To accelerate the time-to-value and ensure ongoing improvement, building a 360 solution is a journey. It must be properly planned, implemented, monitored and optimized from vision to execution—and beyond. Following a rigorous methodology is key to delivering value and expanding use cases to serve the business stakeholders.
Taking an iterative approach to the design and rollout of the 360 solution and outlining the phased delivery of the solution road map will accelerate time-to-value.
Plan
During the planning phase, key business and technology stakeholders determine the business drivers, objectives, and goals.
Establishing a 360 solution can at first can seem daunting. There are many use cases which can be achieved, such as:
- Knowing the customer to expand sales and marketing…or even identifying customers to not target, either due to consent management or due to a difficult track record.
- Improved data quality, yielding high quality, mailable addresses, email verification, or consolidating customers to generate better versions of truth for third party enhancements.
- Establishing data governance practices to harmonize data for consistent views and attribution across the business enterprise.
Considerations may need to be practical/tactical in the early milestones on the 360 solution roadmap. These must still meet business needs and deliver on value in manageable chunks. Selection of data sources and consumers needs to be planned as part of this exercise.
Communication throughout the planning process is key. Ensure that all stakeholders understand the goals and how it impacts them and that the business case is solid. Modify the expected outcomes based on feedback.
Data stewardship is also key. It’s critical to fully understand the data regulatory requirements that impact the project. Organizations need a thorough understanding of data usage, planned applications, and governance requirements, which determines the levels of security and access control to meet corporate data privacy policies as well as laws.
The next step is to develop the solution architecture, including technical requirements, volume requirements, and integration patterns. Determine the functional requirements for the project. Determine the applications which need to comprise the solution, which may need to include analytic applications to consume the mastered data to generate reports. Consider how users and applications will consume and analyze information and the development requirements.
Design and build processes to ensure data quality and to integrate data from source applications. Determine the integration needs for each source application. Data profiling is a critical exercise to execute. Focusing on the source attributes which will be used in the 360 solution profile the data across all of the data quality measures and present the analysis per source to the subject matter experts to gain insights into the data. Assess your master data management strategy, identifying any gaps and developing a model and architecture for data management.
Assess your organization’s resources to understand what skills you will need and where the gaps are. Establish the project rolesfor data analysts, developers, systems administrators, enterprise architect, data steward, and project manager. Identify where you might need new skills or consultant assistance and develop a detailed project plan.
Implement
Following a proven implementation methodology ensures the success of the project and maximizes available resources. As the build phase begins, start by reviewing the project scope and plan developed during the planning phase. You may implement working with your own IT team, with a team of consultants or a blend of both.
Implementation begins with aligning the source attributes to the 360 solution data model. An accelerator data model can be used and extended, such as Customer 360 or Supplier 360. Otherwise, a new data model can be constructed de novo following best practices. Integration mapping from source to target then can begin.
The data profiling assessment and feedback from the planning phase will be used during the implementation to:
- Develop business rules/data validations
- Determine derivations of conformed attributes (record types or new fields)
- Determine configurations for matching and survivorship
Match tuning may be another activity that will iterate the data through match rule configurations, with each iteration’s analysis reviewed by Subject Matter Experts and business stakeholders.
The data stewardship requirements will be implemented by configuring the User Interface, configuring user roles for data authorizations, and developing BPM workflows to manage and audit data authorship.
Establishing governance policies is critical so that data is used in accordance with corporate and regulatory data privacy mandates. Finally, the solution can be put into operations, and the IT team typically takes over the primary responsibility.
Testing and tuning is imperative. Key stakeholders should be involved in acceptance testing to ensure that business objectives are met. Establish the overall test strategy, including the user acceptance testing plan. Determine the performance benchmarks, and test thoroughly to ensure that these will be reached in a production environment. User training is also critical to facilitate acceptance and adoption.
Monitor
Once the 360 solution is deployed and delivering results, operations and monitoring begins. The IT operations team generally takes over the day-to-day running of the infrastructure from the implementation team.
As the 360 solution quickly becomes a core part of business operations, monitoring component operatiions and performance is needed. It’s essential to be notified when issues occur or when operational performance falls below acceptable thresholds.
Monitor system performance to ensure service-level agreements are met and monitor usage and data quality. Monitor the size and variety of your data sets, your data management capabilities, and analytics models to ensure that they continue to meet the business needs.
Optimize
Work with stakeholders to identify what is working well from their perspective to identify new use cases and to continue on the roadmap to achieve the next milestone.
Starting small and demonstrating success to the business is an effective way to reap the full value of the 360 solution investment. Early projects may focus on a small constituency of data stewards.
Data continues to evolve and grow, new data attributes, sources or consumers will be added to the solution.
The business value and ROI of the 360 solution increases as customers, sales and organizations are added to yield full views of how people and/or organizations relate and interact with your business.