Democratizing Data Management With a Self-Service Portal

For most organizations, data is essential for creating a complete view of customers, prospects, suppliers, and partners, and for powering their workflows and systems. Increasingly, data democratization is emerging as the primary means to overcome the challenges of data discovery, maintenance, and activization. By enabling business end users to take control of data, organizations can radically change how they manage and consume information. A primary motivation is to make internal departmental, customer-based, and external supplier data more available across a company.

Yet many companies still struggle to manage and understand the volume and variety of data they accrue. According to research from Gartner, business leaders still face challenges in using analytics to make actionable and informed marketing decisions. Increasingly, they gather information from many sources: artificial intelligence (AI), behavioral analysis, anomaly detection, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the actual products themselves. The resulting silos further limit their ability to effectively use that data for greater efficiency and to increase their bottom line. In this article, we explore the benefits of adopting a unified, self-service data platform to better manage information and ignite growth. 

Democratizing data and empowering business teams

Business leaders and marketing teams often struggle to capitalize on big data to improve ROI and increase revenue. As more organizations undergo digital transformation, data represents a pivotal foundation on which they can build new growth and refine their market strategies. Instead, data and analytics teams often spend inordinate amounts of time managing, formatting, and integrating pools of data, as well as generating reports and dashboards.

They regularly need to assess the accuracy of their data and ensure that it retains clear definitions, ownership, and quality. On the other hand, when data is freely accessible across business systems, end users can more easily verify and integrate that data with systems of engagement and begin long-term monitoring and management. These represent keys steps that will help them better understand prospects and meet campaign goals by matching data with the appropriate use cases.

Benefits of a unified platform for managing data

In the past, separate business units compiled discrete financial, product-based, and customer data while IT and data teams were responsible for managing, cleaning, and organizing that information. In addition to difficulties handling the growing volume, velocity, and variety of data generated by digital technologies, this management scenario has led to disconnected information silos. To counter this trend, adopting a self-service, cloud-based management platform can ensure provisioned access to data across the business units so they can collaborate and streamline their data-enrichment processes.

A typical industry use case illustrates the limitations of taking a piecemeal, manual approach to data management. In the financial services industry, an organization responsible for underwriting business credit lacked a foundational, enterprise-wide view of their customers. In addition to inconsistent account monitoring, the company was hampered by ineffective data integration. To answer that need, Dun & Bradstreet's D&B Connect solution offers an AI-driven self-service portal with easy-to-use controls and fast access to trusted data. As organizations move toward increased digital transformation, they require efficient tools that can help them meet the scale of new data challenges. Through the D&B Connect platform, business users can access instant data control, enrichment protocols, and monitoring tools to reduce the time they spend on data management from weeks to hours.

Using the centralized hub, team members across an organization can drive better performance and improve decision making. Through embedded intelligence and simplified workflows, they can manage data quality and connect critical systems, including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), marketing automation platforms (MAPs), data lakes, and customer data repositories. Team-based dashboards further improve collaborations and simplify data management complexity through integration with Dun & Bradstreet's global data and AI-powered matching algorithms. In addition to unparalleled scale and the quality of insights, customers can be confident of secure access to SOC 2-, CCPA-, and GDPR-certified data from the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud.

Marketing and sales teams want to keep their target and prospect data as clean and close as possible so that they can access, enrich, and maintain that data according to their specific growth targets and campaign needs. Companies recognize that greater data democratization is pivotal to producing those desired outcomes and actionable results. A centralized, self-service data stewardship tool puts the power to manage data and achieve those goals in the business user's hands.

To learn more, visit D&B Connect.

Maggie Granger is Director of Integrated Marketing, Data Management Solutions, at Dun & Bradstreet.