Data Drives IT Decision-Making

Folio reporting:
In the “which came first?” game of the chicken and the egg, the explosion of audience data would seem to be the direct result of the ever-accelerating pace of change in information technology. While IT plays an important role, it’s the data that is driving publishers’ initiatives and strategies. “The data is driving these decisions. IT is just facilitating it,” says Eric Kammerzelt, VP of technology at Cygnus Business Media. “We’re becoming smarter about our audience and our content.”
Internally, good data analytics drives marketing, advertising and editorial initiatives. Most companies rely on the popular open-source application, Google Analytics, together with other third-party programs from companies such as Omniture. External database vendors offer a range of capabilities, such as automating the process of turning data streams into dashboards or merging social media behavior with user profiles.
Externally, advertisers are asking for more than just leads. They want publishers to provide more insight into their potential customers’ behavior. That means delivering better targeting solutions, such as tagging content in order to serve the right contextual ads to the right users.
IT managers have their hands full balancing their organization’s scale and expertise with outside vendors whose systems must communicate seamlessly with their own.
Integrate, Integrate, Integrate
Before data can generate effective analytics and dashboards, IT managers must first identify all the different types of data, where they are located, and pull them together in a central database...
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