SOA Value Chains?

PvT: Who are the prime contributors to the development and support of an operational marketing and service innovation platform? And how did you start researching the technical ecosystem—what you and I now call engagement marketspace?

We started in 1995 with digital asset management and content management because no matter what else came along, you must have a media and content under management.

In 2000, we started investigating another class of vendors in the marketing automation, MRM, and marketing operations management space. Some of the vendors have make great progress.

With rare exception, they all still need to better understand DAM and, more the point, metadata management—a database and DBA for logging and tracking enterprise metadata as instantiated in all enterprise databases, including ERP and CRM, as a strategic asset.

Since 2004, we have tracked vendors that come from the CRM, business intelligence, and process analytics space.

For the last three or so years, we have tried to understand firms in marketing service provider and data enrichment vendors—lots to cover!

Of course there are whole sets of vendors in dynamic messaging and email management content space, and in the customer experience management space too/

As I stated before, there’s many different technology vectors in the marketing and innovation value chain, that ultimately support the idea of an innovation-services platform.

This calls attention to, however, the critical need for leadership within marketing to have a services integration framework and an underlying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabling this integration framework. IBM does some great work there with its component business models—what I call CIO blueprints.

Services integration

However, the senior marketing executive, not the CIO, must commission and own the services integration framework—it basically specifies in one wall-mounted poster all of the services – marketing and innovation-related services – of the business eco-system from which the firm will build, buy, or rent technology or engagement services over the next five years.

Now, the CIO blueprint represent an living, evolving visual depiction of one thing: how firm intends provision services needed attracting, serving, and keeping profitable customers for life.

The CIO blueprint also makes explicit how the firm intends to marshal the resources of a global business eco-system: ‘Here’s what we bring to the customer experience. Here’s what our partners bring, and here’s how it all integrate to an end-to-end process of customer-making.

PvT: I guess that repositions marketing automation a bit player in a larger play?

MM: Well, I don’t think that the rubric of marketing automation delivers useful distinction anymore. I don’t like the term “marketing automation” because many of the research firms and vendors have abused the term, rendering it useless.

Rather, I would like to speak about marketing in terms of process maturities, and levels of process maturity for a marketing operation.

Again, the senior executive doesn’t really care about technology or marketing automation, per se, he or she is most concerned with operational capabilities and building or enhancing capabilities which will related directly to a process maturity model for marketing operation.

However, this all underscores a very strategic point: business rules and metadata enable orchestration of the technologies and processes of how firms attract, serve, and keep customers for life. Very, very few technology vendors deliver solutions for orchestrating the customer engagement life cycle. Typically, the missed or underplay the role of three SOA capabilities: digital asset management, metadata management, and marketing claims management.

Marketing claims management

This last one, marketing claims management, entails a end-to-end workflow for developing and publishing approved copywritten material—product or service claims—to a specialize XML database publishing system. I use the term broadly to include anything written, formatted, and published in printed collateral, business communications, web sites, interactive detailing or presentation systems, catalogs, microsites, newsletters, etc.

In my view of the world, marketing claims management represents a subsystem of DAM and metadata management—that in turn represent subsystems of master data management.

And all of which requires a IT governance scheme—systems, processes, and accountabilities for researching, acquiring or developing, deploying, provisioning, managing, and retiring the technologies used to attract, serve, and keep customers for life!

Key point: tomorrow’s CMOs are mid-level IT executives today getting their masters in Business Administration or Media Psychology.