How to define your investment in big data

Excerpted from Dave Booth’s November column for MediaPost, “Defining Your Investment in Big Data”:

When we released our own survey of digital analytics maturity across industries, we found that many organizations tend to be ambitious in terms of their objective and scope, but lack the rudimentary business processes and methodologies required to follow through. Others tend to over-invest in technology while ignoring the people and resources to use, and still others define lofty goals and aspirations with respect to what they would like to do with data, but have not formalized the governance aspect.

Most organizations would do well to spend time reflecting upon their current state and exploring which steps they need to take across all aspects of maturity to bring themselves into balance and grow. Charting a course of realistic expectations over a two-year-plus timeline is a fantastic way to achieve a higher level of maturity.

Read the entire column here.

David Booth

David is a founding partner and principal consultant at Cardinal Path, as well as an author, instructor, adjunct professor, and regular speaker. As a consultant, David has advised and worked with companies and organizations across five continents in web analytics and business intelligence, statistical analysis and testing, technology selection and deployment, and online & search marketing. David is the author of Google AdWords Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011) and Google Website Optimizer Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2010) and served as a technical editor of Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (Wiley, 2010) and Google Analytics Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011). He is currently working on yet another project to be published in the Spring of 2012, and he teaches a masters level course on web analytics and online marketing at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. As an instructor and speaker, David has keynoted numerous events and has led seminars and sessions focused on digital analytics and search & conversion marketing all around the world for audiences ranging from C-level executives to technical implementation teams. He has been involved in web application development as an engineer and consultant since the late 1990's, beginning his career with Intel Corporation. He was a founder and partner at WebShare, LLC through its merger, and spent two years with the United States Peace Corps developing and deploying websites and web applications to attract grants and international aid for Guatemalan NGOs and local development organizations. David earned his Master of Business Administration in International Management from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.