Not long ago I took my four children to Harvard University’s Natural History Museum. As we walked through campus my nine-year-old son asked if I’d visited the area before. I explained that I had visited the campus, but that it was when I was still in college. With a sly smile and quick wit he quipped, “You mean in the 1900s.” Well, it is true it was the 1900s, but really, did he need to make me feel that old? I smiled and jokingly reminded him I was his ticket home.

Now, let me tell you the same story from a different perspective. On April 4, 2008, I visited the Harvard Natural History Museum. The museum has a fine collection of prehistoric skeletons, fossils, rocks and minerals. It is located in Cambridge, MA. While visiting the museum I was called old.

Which story did you find most insightful? Could you tell the second story was meant to be funny? While many of the same facts are presented, without the context provided by the first recitation, you completely miss the humor in the story.

Our business systems operate in much the same fashion. For years, organizations have been striving for the oft-perceived nirvana of a 360-degree view of the customer. Three-hundred-sixty degrees forms a complete circle where we share facts about our customer. And in fact, this view is a relevant and necessary business imperative. But it’s not enough. Let me provide an example.

Like many collections call centers, a list of delinquent accounts is provided. Collections agents are incented to reduce the outstanding debt as much as possible. They are presented with the name, phone number and outstanding amount due for each call. Amongst the long to-call list is Jane Smith (name changed to protect the innocent). Jane is 60 days overdue on her last bill.

As the collections agent, how are you going to treat Jane?

Now what if you have a more complete picture of Jane? A 360-degree business view might tell you Jane Smith has been a customer for five years. It might also tell you what services she has ordered, and that she has no outstanding customer complaints on file. Would you treat Jane differently now?

This is great; I now have a 360-degree view of Jane Smith. It’s what every enterprise strives for, right? But is it enough?

Maybe - but getting a 360-degree view of your business is like holding a beach ball that isn’t inflated. It has a lot of potential; if you look closely you can kind of make out a picture of what’s printed on the side. But until you blow up that beach ball, you’re only getting half the picture and almost none of the intended function.

What if you also knew that customers in Jane’s neighborhood have seen a 38 percent spike in inaccurate billing invoices over the past 90 days? And what if you also knew that the account manager assigned to Jane’s account was reprimanded three times for not processing payments in a timely manner, and that Jane’s service was erroneously cut off once before for similar circumstances? How would you treat your interaction with Jane now?

You do need a 360-degree view of your customer, but just like a deflated beach ball it provides a skewed picture. Instead of a circle you need to think of your business as a three-dimensional sphere made up of many 360-degree views rich in context; a view that finds relationships between items, and is as dynamic as your business.

Just like a sphere where no one circle dominates the shape, no one data point is more important than the other. The complete sphere is only recognized and understood when all of the circles come together to provide a complete picture.

In Jane’s case you needed information from your customer support center, your service delivery group, financial systems and employee productivity files.

The great part of a sphere is that it looks the same from every angle - it is equally valuable from the top, bottom, left or right no matter who’s holding it. In the same manner, your data management solution can be equally effective across the many different perspectives employees need to be successful. You don’t have to share the same application, or the same entry point to the data; you just have to share context.

So - stop thinking in degrees, and start running your business in radians.

How do you do that? Keep these principles in mind and your business will be well on its way to batting that beach ball across the office.

• Forget 360 - think sphere. Make it your internal mantra to share and explore data across the organization.
• Don’t get caught in the application wars. With the right underlying infrastructure you don’t need consensus, least common denominator solutions. You can have personalized unique views into the data.
  
• Explore new technologies such as advanced data warehouse appliances that eliminate scalability constraints and enable flexible, affordable alternatives that are IT- and business-friendly.

The next time you’re battling over data ownership and budget allocation, whip out that beach ball and remind everyone that data management can be comprehensive, it can be collaborative, it must be flexible and, most importantly, it might even be fun.

About the author:

Samantha Stone is the vice president of marketing at Dataupia, where she is responsible for marketing communications, product management, product marketing, and demand generation. Stone has more than 12 years of experience executing product launches and multi-channel marketing programs for award-winning product lines from companies such as Powersoft, Informix, PC DOCS, SAP and Netezza. For more about Dataupia, visit www.dataupia.com.