Four Reasons Not To Run Contact Governance through Your IT Department
Posted on Wed, Oct 12, 2011 @ 07:56 AM
By Bill McCarthy
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“Why can’t I just build it myself and use my IT group?” is a question we have heard more than once at Gryphon from sales and marketing teams. It’s tempting to take advantage of an existing resource, keep the whole process in-house and save money. Sounds like an easy, cost savings home run. Yet, after years of experience fixing that system after the fact, or stepping into the process to warn of the consequences, we have seen the same issues show up again and again. Here are four top reasons we advise against deciding to use your IT department for compliance marketing solution.
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1. Privacy Compliance Challenges are Unique and require specialized legal expertise
Contact Governance is a unique regulatory challenge for marketers, very different than the purposes for which most internal B2C IT has been designed. The IT system has been traditionally set up with the top priority of supporting business/customer interactions at customer touch points, since that is the closest point to customers and prospects – B2C bread and butter. Contact governance/compliance requires specialized regulatory expertise with ever changing legislation-our legal staff is currently tracking 630 pieces of pending legislation that would impact marketing privacy, and thousands more globably. Marketing Privacy and contact governance is often outside the scope of expertise of the corporate privacy team who specializes in data privacy, not marketing privacy. These legal experts must maintain critical control as well as maintain system updates on a timely basis to keep the company marketing team in compliance. Marketing needs to change its programs based on customer need and program changes are often delayed compared to daily operations at customer touch points, and almost always treated secondarily whenever competing against customer-facing operations.
2. Valuable Intelligence is Lost.
Secondly, IT is broad. When contact governance is lump-summed into IT, it gets easily lost and misused by the talent that handles hardware, storage, software, and networking. That is a huge loss and potential risk for the company brand. The true value of contact governance needs to be tapped by those who understand regulatory compliance programs and how data is turned into impactful intelligence from meaningless data bytes -- then assemble and align those servers, disk drives, software, and network devices to support those purposes. No matter who you go to – strategist, analyst, database and Internet developers, and network and system administrators, they should all be able to tell you how their work is related to acquiring and retaining loyal good customers for a business.
3. Get the Attention You Need
For any Business to Consumer company looking to avoid a fight with their regulatory, sales and marketing for IT attention or who don’t want to devote the resources needed to make their contact governance operation cutting-edge competitive, going to the right contact governance expert is always a wise and logical choice.
4. Get the Evidence You Need
It is also important to remember that if a chief marketing officer (CMOs) is looking for tangible proof that her/his direct marketing is working effectively. It is unlikely that they will get the priority treatment and expertise from internal IT as they can from a dedicated contact governance provider. Quick wins insured with an indemnified contact governance provider are critical for any CMOs who want a data-driven culture to grow and take hold within their organizations.
