Analytics and Dynamic Customer Strategy: Big Profits from Big Data

Chapter 11Leading (in) the Dynamic Customer Culture

In the last chapter, I distinguished between change management and project management. Implementing a specific technology may only be project management; implementing Big Data and Dynamic Customer Strategy requires change management along with project management because of the culture shift required. Chances are that since you are engaged in leadership, you've already started thinking about the changes you'll make and how much project management or change management is needed. But as my friend Paul Greenberg says, customer-centricity is “both a strategy and a philosophy,” and as DCS reflects both strategy and philosophy, leadership is even more important in finishing the job.

This change is a culture change in two ways. The first is that the customer is the center of everything, and the second is that data is the center of everything. Yes, I'm fully aware that both really can't be true—maybe. And yes, I'm fully aware that for a long time—probably longer than you even realize—people have said to put the customer at the center of everything. Before Big Data, though, we couldn't really do that. The mechanisms for carrying the voice of the customer throughout the organization just weren't strong enough.

So when I say that the customer and data are at the center of everything, I'm really saying that it's the Big Data that allows us to put the customer at the center. And that requires cultural changes in how data is thought about, ...