by Angela Guess
Michael Koehler, CEO of Teradata has said that “it was finance chiefs (over other board executives) in US and European companies who were ‘owning’ the initiative to improve data capture and management. Data is also increasingly playing a vital role in more traditional companies, such as airlines and shipping businesses, where board directors can tap into ‘faster, cleaner, more consistent data’ via deeply granular dashboards to speed up decision making, improve efficiency, reduce costs and energy consumption.”
Herman Wimmer of Teradata added, “Whoever gets the data can influence the market. Whoever understands customer behaviour will be the winner out of this… We shouldn’t have one database for customers, one for suppliers and one for marketing. You see people who understand the value of integrated data. We see that more and more CFOs understand this value.”
The article continues, “The majority of companies however still work on separate database systems that typically don’t ‘talk’ to each other, but Wimmer said he was positive that the ‘data silos’ in companies were becoming less and less. Mobile technologies have exponentially changed the way consumers purchase goods and businesses market goods and services. But to tap into these developments companies must first learn to capture the myriad strains of data from internal as well as external sources like social media to minimise, among other issues, the so-called ‘churn’ rate – the rate at which companies lose customers.”
photo credit: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget
