Analytics and Dynamic Customer Strategy: Big Profits from Big Data

Chapter 10The Near-Simultaneous Adoption of Multiple Innovations

The adoption of Big Data is a case of what we labeled near-simultaneous adoption of multiple innovations.¹ Because there are so many innovations available at the same time—social media, marketing automation, self-serve analytics, data visualization tools, machine-generated data, and so on—traditional change management models and adoption maturity curves don't work very well. Rather, tools like a technology road map are far more important because the perspective has to be longer than just what you'll do this quarter or next week.

Most of this investment in Big Data technology will be in marketing. Marketing already accounts for up to 45 percent of companies' technology budgets, and by 2017 more of the technology budget is expected to be spent by the CMO than the CIO.² While much of that hype depends on what you call marketing technology and may downplay the role of the CIO unfairly, the reality is that marketing still spends a lot of money on information technology. Further, estimates are that spending on Big Data will double in 2014 and increase another 50 percent in 2015.³

Choosing to adopt a data strategy and the necessary technology to implement Big Data into your decision making is innovative—at least for now. We can map organizations to a maturity curve in their use of data to make decisions; in fact, mapping maturity curves has been the purpose of several studies, and there are a dozen or more consultants ...