Planes and platforms
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 8:57 am
Question – would you buy a plane, but not allow for a pilot to fly it or a ground crew to maintain it?
The logical answer would be no. Unless you’re looking for a museum piece that never leaves the hangar, the cost of running the plane would be built into the business case to buy the plane. Surprisingly the same logic is not often carried through to analytics and optimisation.
There’s usually a good number of zeros involved in the licensing so you would expect no dust to be allowed to settle. Unfortunately, given our involvement with enterprise level analytics and optimisation platforms, we regularly see companies budgeting for the licensing and initial implementation, but not allowing for the training and maintenance required post implementation.
Taking flight
Like a website, an analytics or optimisation platform is saint lucia email list 26037 contact leads a living thing that grows with your team and experience. It will move from being a licensing sunk cost to a critical business tool that pays for itself many times over in sales, engagement and customer insight.
I had the privilege of being part of a team within the higher education sector that grew from 2 people to 11 people, largely based on business cases using trusted data from our platforms. So I know first hand that it can work.
So, how do you go about this?
Understand what you’re purchasing
Firstly, you need to understand that you’re taking on an enterprise level platform that requires significant effort before it can start to be used as a business intelligence tool.
Your platform licensing contract will typically span multiple budget cycles, so make sure you have a line item in each successive budget cycle that allows for staff training and specialist consulting for things that aren’t out of the box. Like any specialist knowledge, make sure that your staff share knowledge internally. This will protect you against starting again at square one as a result of them leaving.
The logical answer would be no. Unless you’re looking for a museum piece that never leaves the hangar, the cost of running the plane would be built into the business case to buy the plane. Surprisingly the same logic is not often carried through to analytics and optimisation.
There’s usually a good number of zeros involved in the licensing so you would expect no dust to be allowed to settle. Unfortunately, given our involvement with enterprise level analytics and optimisation platforms, we regularly see companies budgeting for the licensing and initial implementation, but not allowing for the training and maintenance required post implementation.
Taking flight
Like a website, an analytics or optimisation platform is saint lucia email list 26037 contact leads a living thing that grows with your team and experience. It will move from being a licensing sunk cost to a critical business tool that pays for itself many times over in sales, engagement and customer insight.
I had the privilege of being part of a team within the higher education sector that grew from 2 people to 11 people, largely based on business cases using trusted data from our platforms. So I know first hand that it can work.
So, how do you go about this?
Understand what you’re purchasing
Firstly, you need to understand that you’re taking on an enterprise level platform that requires significant effort before it can start to be used as a business intelligence tool.
Your platform licensing contract will typically span multiple budget cycles, so make sure you have a line item in each successive budget cycle that allows for staff training and specialist consulting for things that aren’t out of the box. Like any specialist knowledge, make sure that your staff share knowledge internally. This will protect you against starting again at square one as a result of them leaving.