Database Marketing Loves IT

Posted by Cathy Carleton on 9 December 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: leads

KEEPING YOUR DATA IN-HOUSE VS. OUTSOURCING

C-SUITE COMRADERIE

A few years ago at a National Center for Database Marketing conference, I heard that the decision whether or not a marketing organization should build their database management functionality in-house often rests on the relationship between two people - the marketing chief and the head of technology. If that's true, how does that play out in your organization?

Is their relationship collaborative and friendly? Then building and maintaining a marketing database in-house can work very well. But if the two executives regularly engage in silo defense and turf-grabbing, then outsourcing may be faster, less stressful on the business, and offer you more autonomy and flexibility with your data.

Naturally, politics shouldn't be a key factor in the decision. But delay-driven opportunity costs should be. You can successfully pull an internally-managed database solution into the station even if your CMO and CTO are ‘frenemies'. But it will take longer while they argue over who's driving the bus.

How much incremental revenue, cost savings, or efficiency do you lose in the meantime? You need to figure it out, then figure factor it into your decision process.

STAFFING AND SKILLS

I was once refused administrative rights to a direct mail database, due to a business rule that only the IT team members were qualified DBA's. I challenged the rule, citing my assistant's graduate degree in Computer Science and the fifteen years of database experience between us. We did get our rights - but because we had the proper credentials, not because we were entitled to autonomy. If you don't possess real qualifications within your team or have immediate plans to hire people with them, outsourcing is probably best.

STEWARDSHIP

You've got to put yourself in your tech manager's shoes. A poorly written query against a database on a shared server could grind a production system to a halt. When the field offices suddenly can't enter any new contracts, she's the one who has to stand in front of the Sales VP's desk explaining what happened, not the hapless marketing guy who set the whole thing in motion.

So give her a comfort level by talking like a DBA instead of a marketer. Which statement will be more effective in dispelling her fear?

1. "It's our database - we know what we're doing - you won't be sorry."
2. "I promise, I'll never perform a six-table outer left join without a where clause or import a two million row table without proper indexing."

If you know what (2) means, she will realize you're aware of the type of bad acting that brings down servers and she has your word that it won't happen on your watch. If you don't know what it means, you should seriously consider outsourcing.

RISK TOLERANCE

The server corrupts, the on-call junior tech loads the backup, which corrupts too, and keeps loading each previous backup until they're all damaged. Or you discover that the backup failed every night for the last three weeks, but the failure notification went to the phone of an employee laid off last June. It happens. Tight procedures and consistent oversight help mitigate it, but the risk is inherent to any in-house database solution.
Many consider outsourcing safer. But consider the October 2009 T-Mobile Sidekick debacle - a catastrophic database failure in which some vital client data was irretrievably lost. And the keeper of the data wasn't some undercapitalized DB startup - it was Microsoft. They've since recovered some of the lost data, but confidence in outsourcing and cloud computing in particular has taken a definite hit.

Outsourcing data failures are fairly rare, and you at least have the option to sue. But either outsourcing or in-house failure can cripple your operation and lose customers. You need to honestly assess how well your in-house staff can execute on database maintenance best practices, compared to the vendor's ability to do the same, and use those risk factors in your decision.

PLAN B: TRAINING WHEELS AND TRANSPARENCY

If you definitely want to take your database operations in-house, and your tech team balks, you can offer to launch with "training wheel" rights and gradually earn your way to autonomy. Offer to:

• Request read-only and row append rights to start.
• Email all query coding to an IT manager for quality assurance. 
• Schedule weekly meetings to review server load metrics, table change requirements, and new data loads you need them to support. 
• Call for advance clearance to append more than a 100K records into the database.

Give it six weeks and ask again. If you've been diligent, you'll likely be granted full rights to manage your database. The tech department doesn't really want to review your code, add more meetings to their schedules, or interrupt their day to approve your appends. They just want a comfort level that:

• You acknowledge you are playing in their sandbox
• You won't break anything
• You will be a good steward of the data

About the Author

Cathy Carleton loves to find the story in the data.  She is a Red Sox fan,
doesn't answer the phone when Mad Men's on, and heads up Database Marketing
at Yellowbook.