A revolution in marketing data architecture (+ a better way to enable access, and activate your data warehouse)

When it comes to data, everybody seems to be putting everything in the warehouse — and for a lot of good reasons.

• It saves time having all your data de-siloed and gathered into a single source.
• It improves data quality by helping ensure your policies are uniformly followed and that replicated or poor data is remediated.
• It expands the value of your data by making it easy to apply business analytics.
• It increases data security by reducing your attack surface.

The advantages of a warehouse go on and on, but even with all these benefits, many companies still struggle to manage access so that data can be activated effectively and near real time.

A focus on data activation — why and how?

Put simply, you can do this the way most organizations do it: by tasking IT to tap into the warehouse every time and mine whatever data your marketing team needs. That hands the IT team the responsibilities for querying, for managing, for delivering reports, and for all kinds of things that can take up time, increase potential misses and errors, and generally slow down the flow of data to its highest value.

There is another approach that offers greater flexibility, speeds the process, and empowers the marketing team to do more with more activation-ready data—without overburdening the IT team. At Lytics, we adopt a two-way flow of data from its sources to and from the warehouse. Say you have an email channel manager, an ads manager, social, and web. These functions are manipulating data in a host of different ways that the Lytics solution can aggregate and then deliver into your data warehouse. Or place profiles into the warehouse so that they are ready for activation. This way, all the data is ready for activation while the IT team maintains technical control.

Speaking of control, using this Lytics architecture, your data isn’t held hostage by a third party. With Lytics, your data is your data; it’s not locked down, changed, or placed into a proprietary system that requires you to stick with Lytics. Your data is your own—no company should charge you for what amounts to an easement over it. The Lytics philosophy is open. Everything is accessible, and everything goes to the warehouse so it’s all available for activation. You can push data science scores, return profiles, and query results. It’s incredibly flexible, unlike a lot of companies where you can’t use your own data unless you go through their platform. That’s not Lytics. We want to help you connect the dots between whatever tools are best to achieve your goals.

At the same time, you don’t want the risky behavior of inappropriate access to data by the wrong roles so that IT can no longer manage it. That’s where things break down: If any marketer or analyst can go into your BigQuery instance any time and try to access what they want, how they want. Then it’s not a warehouse—it’s Pandora’s box.

All this shouldn’t require that you learn new skills or start using all new tools. With Lytics, you’ve already created your permissions; you don’t need to recreate them. The whole process is done with what the IT team already knows: the same queries, the same permissions, and the same rules. Lytics gives you the flexibility to use exactly the skills and tools you already have to cherry-pick the information that’s available (for instance, to a marketer).

Let Lytics turbocharge your customer data activation, without a hassle or inefficiency

The solution seems so simple: We want everything to be in the warehouse, ready to activate from a marketing standpoint right from there. If “revolution” means turning things around, then this approach really is a revolution, and it’s one where everyone wins.

Rethink your data warehouse. Find out more of how Lytics turbocharges your data by putting control in your hands while empowering the right people and teams to do their jobs without undue hand-holding.