For IBM’s recent Global CMO Study (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cmo/cmostudy2011/cmo-registration.html), 1,734 CMOs were interviewed and asked about their most pressing issues. Their biggest concern? The ever-larger amounts of data which they’re expected to understand and act on – a whopping 71% of CMOs interviewed said they felt unprepared to deal with the massive amounts of data now being captured by their organizations on customers and prospects.
As businesses become more sophisticated in capturing data on every facet of the customer interaction, they’ve accumulated an enormous treasure-trove of information. However, as this study reveals, in most cases they don’t know what to do with it! As we’ve long maintained, although all insight starts with data, it can’t stop there – gathering the data and even analyzing it aren’t enough. It has to be done with intelligence, it has to be done with the aim of generating actionable insight – and it has to be done quickly enough so that the insights are still relevant to the ever-changing market conditions that CMOs face today.
