360° Views Everywhere and Down Under
But when your data is diverse, unaligned, siloed, and distributed, pulling together such views can be challenging. It’s a universal problem, and one that TIBCO Global Elite Partner Ascention Services Pty Ltd out of Australia and New Zealand, is all-too familiar with.
So, I reached out to Ascention CEO W. Daniel Cox III to get his “down under” insights on the 360° view challenge and how businesses can turn it into a profitable opportunity.
Dan, to provide context, let’s start with an introduction to Ascention.
“We, at Ascention, love to tell stories and help our clients understand and tell their stories through data and appropriately applied solutions. A client’s story must be clear, consistent, and meaningful. To make this happen we take care to learn the grassroots business and culture of our clients and the outcomes they seek. By coupling this with education, knowledge transfer, and our extensive experience in data governance, literacy, lineage, quality, shared data assets, and analytics empowers our clients to do better things, not just to do things better!
TIBCO Global New Partner of the Year winner in 2020, our services have been recognized by CIO Advisor as one of the Top 10 Data Analytics Consulting/Service Companies in APAC-2020.”
That gives you a great vantage point on the 360° view opportunity and challenges. Why is this such a hot topic “down under?”
“Organizations here, as everywhere, compete on a world stage. World-class customer experiences, operational excellence, and continuous innovation are do-or-die. Knowing this, our clients are driven to adapt their businesses’ apace.
They see their data as the key. Data helps them fully understand their customers, their processes, their product development. Their data provides an asset they can leverage to undertake the business transformations required to be world-class.
And while our clients have a clear vision of the data-driven business opportunities, they are challenged by issues such as complex data landscapes with legacy transaction systems, myriad data warehouses, and now data lakes, plus cloud versions of all of the above.
We help them overcome these data silo issues and realize their business objectives.”
What makes Ascention well equipped to assist clients with their 360° view efforts?
“We apply our business domain knowledge to our clients’ chains, seeking ways to improve, perhaps even revolutionize them.
This leads inevitably to data, where our deep data and analytics skills are critical in assisting clients realise their business goals. We help them uncover all their relevant data and bring it together in a more coherent and accessible way.
For example, if the client is trying to increase revenue by selling additional products to current customers, they need data about past purchases, sales efforts, service and support status, and even credit and billings. In other words, they need a full 360° view of customer engagement. With this information in hand, we help them maximize its value via data-driven next best offer recommendations, marketing campaign suggestions, perhaps even sales compensation proposals.”
Bring together the data, make it more coherent, and analyze it. Is it really just that easy?
“Unfortunately, the bad news is that it’s not that easy. But the good news is it is getting easier in several ways.
First, we don’t make our clients put their data in one place before they try to leverage it. Instead, we help them use offerings such as TIBCO Data Virtualization to access data where it lies, transform it for business use, and then surface it for easy access by analytics tools and teams.
Second, we no longer rely on IT alone. We implement modern Master Data Management (MDM) tools such as TIBCO EBX suitable for business domain experts. This expands the resources available to improve data quality and relevance. For example, at Netspend, a leading provider of prepaid debit cards, business users directly input new product terms and programs without having to wait for the help of IT.
Third, we help our clients address their data challenges more holistically: not as a data integration problem, or a data quality problem, or a master data problem, etc. This “old school” thinking resulted from the narrow first-generation tools. Today we help our clients compose data solutions that seamlessly leverage whatever data management capabilities are required. TIBCO Cloud Metadata, which combines data cataloging, data governance, and metadata management in a single offering, is a good example.”
“We apply our business domain knowledge to our clients’ chains, seeking ways to improve them. This leads inevitably to data, where our deep data and analytics skills are critical in assisting clients realise their business goals.”
That sounds like a compelling approach and universally useful. If organizations wanted to explore 360° views in particular or business/data opportunities in general, how do they reach you?
“I encourage everyone to follow Ascention and me on LinkedIn as we regularly publish blogs, whitepapers, and articles addressing opportunities and use cases. Readers can also contact us directly for an open conversation on their data-driven business opportunities. And join us for a webinar on October 15th where we will dive deeper on 360° views.”
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