Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology

Chapter 10

How to Change Your Processes

No amount of big talk about convergence will matter unless your organization has the right processes to guide it on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, few do. Most plan and budget for the long term in a way that doesn’t respect today’s lightning-quick innovation cycles. They fail to take advantage of a marketing ecosystem that allows for real-time optimization and constant reiteration. In this chapter, we’ll describe the specific steps you need to take to get the right processes in place to embrace convergence.

1. Change Measurement and Establish Objectives

You’re about to make a lot of big changes and cause a lot of disruption in your organization, likely causing some queasiness among those used to doing things the old way. There is a need to be able to demonstrate that these changes are having a concrete impact on the business. What you need is a shared measurement framework. Or if you already have one, you might need to optimize it or tidy it up.

A call for measurement may have you worrying about a huge new outlay. This step doesn’t necessarily entail huge incremental spending. Many companies who aren’t measuring properly are already spending many millions of dollars on Oracle and Omniture. It’s just that the investment isn’t well deployed. Fixing it is often a case of doing better with what you have, remediating your current systems, and getting more out of it. It might be switching on your always-on research tools—listening platforms ...