IT and insights - adversaries or best friends?

IT is often seem as the panacea for all information ailments. However, it cannot replace the analysis and market sensing (Day, 1994), which happens through people in an organisation.

IT holds remarkable potential for gathering information. But in my experience it often leads to information overload because the cost of acquiring information has been dropping rapidly. This means that market information for a time has paradoxically stopped being as strategic as it used to be. An organisation need no longer think as hard about what information it needs and what it needs it for. It just collects as much as it can. Hopefully, we will se a move towards a different trend. IT can help there too -synthesizing and condensing information.

In terms of helping create insights, I see great opportunities in network IT, which enable discussions and spreading of information across an organisation. It puts people back into the loop. Basically, people need to meet and talk, that is when the magic happens. The sparks that form insights, the patterns, ideas and breakthroughs an IT system can never provide. So are insights and IT best friends forever? You can have market insights without IT, but the information beneath the insight is more easily spread and gathered using smart IT.

Communicate to Create Employee Interest

Employee interest and commitment is central to creating a market-oriented organisation. Internal marketing plays a fundamental role in enabling this interest. Actually, organisations should run campaigns directed at employees just as they do to customers. The customer experience and business success depend on it.

This can be especially challenging in technical cultures, where 'soft' concepts from marketing just does not ressonate well. For Bang & Olufsen, I suggested that they use their own technology to communicate being market-oriented to employees. B&O's 'Beolab 5' loud speakers have the special quality that they emit a sound and calculate their position in a room and then send out sound that is optimally calibrated to that room. Being market oriented is not that far from this analogy. You need to intelligently collect information, process it and determine what to use to make better 'music'.

But this is certainly not a one size fits all solution. Marketeers and managers should carefully consider the culture and central elements not only in the organisation as a whole, but also in various departments. The Beolab 5 example will probably work best in the most engineer-heavy divisions.