Integrate to compete

Cameron Hulett, senior vice president of Acceleration, explains how publishers can integrate their data systems to remain competitive.

Tuesday, 25 May 2010

If you haven’t noticed, the publishing world has changed. No longer is it about generating great content via gut feel, selling standard ads and using traditional channels to market. The complexity of online publishing has forced publishers to implement a plethora of new technologies to make it all work.

The standard value chain looks something like this:


This is changing all the time. So just when you thought “customer relationship management” was enough to manage your sales process, along comes “audience relationship management”. Then “data service providers” appear from nowhere. Then “business intelligence” becomes vital…you get the picture.

The golden thread through this entire chain is data. If you can understand your visitors better (via visitor engagement management) and engage with advertisers better (via customer relationship management), you can sell better (via sales workflow), deliver more efficiently (via adserving) and manage partners more efficiently (via network management).

But, more often than not, all the systems used live independently, creating silos of data. What if you could integrate all the data and leverage it across the disparate systems?

The value is clear to see. You could leverage visitor information data in the ad server to increase ad revenue (via behavioural targeting). You could feed back adserving information to improve sales. You could feed financial data back into CRM to get faster payment. And the list goes on.

Many leading online publishers with deep pockets have undertaken this integration accomplishing it via pure brute strength. But how does the average publisher go about it? Fear not, there is a way.

Leveraging strengths

I see a lot of publishers trying to cobble together a few of their systems using either internal resources, or external resources that don’t deeply understand each system. Nearly 30% of customers who come to Acceleration for integration work do so after their own attempts have failed. Trying to fix the result of a failed integration can be a costly business – from a time, resource and financial perspective. I’d estimate the total cost is 200-300% more if you have to redo an integration. That’s quite a hefty financial weight to bear when the economy is doing well, let alone in today’s challenging business times. So starting on the right footing it vital.

First, let’s consider software vendors. They are strongest on their specific technology and selling it is their primarily business. That is not to say they can’t integrate their specific technology into your value chain, but standard “vanilla” implementations typically suite them better. They typically shy from helping clients with their organisational processes or issues, which are more often than not a key requirement when integrating multiple technologies. Added to this, their knowledge is deep in their specific system rather than the other systems in your value chain. That is why publishers often tend towards one-stop-shop vendors, where multiple technologies are already integrated.

Second, consider your business. Publishers typically aren’t skilled enough in the minutiae of each technology they use when it comes to the technology backend, system migration or change management – all a requirement for integration. The publisher’s sights are set firmly on the business benefits that the software has promised to deliver, not what their organisation needs to do as a whole to unlock that value.

To make integration work, consider how you leverage the key strengths of the following solution providers:

1. Technology vendors – strong in implementing and training on their specific technology in a standard manner, then hosting and supporting their specific technology.

2. Integration specialists – strong in developing overall solution designs and technically integrating the multiple platforms (also often used to check and justify the implementation of new technologies)

3. Organisational process and adoption specialists – strong in ensuring the overall designed solution works for your organisation and is well adopted. This could mean training inhouse users and or outsourcing parts of the process.

Getting it right means using the right skills

For one-off projects like integration, you don’t have the luxury of doing it a couple of times to learn the ins and outs. Integration is all about existing knowledge. People connect the dots and pull it all together. Although this sounds obvious, the norm is often to assume vendors or single product users can understand the entire picture and pull it all together. This is not the case, where specific experience and skills are required to get it right first time. Reinventing the wheel, especially if you have never built a chariot, is never a good idea.

In my experience in the publishing sector, there aren’t many people that have a combination of deep technical knowledge in multiple products, ad operations skills and publisher business experience. And without understanding all of these, it is extremely difficult to deliver on the real integration your business requirements.

One size doesn’t fit all

When it comes to integration, every business has different requirements from the organisational as well as the technical perspective. Even if you have one new technology, simply managing the switchover from your old system to the new and then managing the organisational change is a challenge. This may require product specialists who understand specific ad-serving tools and where they fit in the delivery chain (e.g. CRM, ad sales and delivery workflow, business intelligence, data warehousing etc.). There may be a need for training and user adoption skills to explain the end-to-end online ad environment. And then there might be hands-on trafficking and ad operations experts who can assist with the structural set-up and data creation. These are not typical resources a publisher has internally nor skills offered by the technology vendor.

And of course integration specialists have a far broader view of the industry, seeing things your organisation just doesn’t get exposed to. Imagine for example your IT team spending months or years writing code to integrate two technologies, only to find out later that specialists would have used a modern platform-as-a-service integration solution, which costs far less, is far faster and much more robust.

Where to start - use a delivery methodology

Integration can be tackled in a controlled and predictable manner. It begins with using a well-defined and tested methodology and then tailoring the details to meet your company’s specific requirements and environments.

At a high level, it is important to include at least the following in your process:

1) Diagnostics and solution design

This key step avoids guesswork. Without it, it is near impossible to reap the full business benefits of a system integration exercise. This is where the combination of business thinking and technology expertise really comes into play. What does your business need? What technology do you have already? What are your options? How can we make it all work together to deliver your requirements? What does your organisation need to do to use it?

2) Integration delivery

Once the overall architecture is designed, stick to the plan, implement the technology, communicate changes, engage stakeholders and fulfil all the other typical project management best practices. Leverage the vendors where best suited.

3) Knowledge transfer

With the new system built and integrated, this phase ensures that there is a clear organisational migration path from the old to the new way of working and that there are processes in place to ensure that users are trained on how to get the best from it.

4) Periodic health checks

Follow up everything with periodic checks to ensure that the solution continues to deliver what it was designed to do.

If you have the full suite of skills in-house, then use them. If not, make sure you bring in the right skills upfront, at least during the solution design phase to start on the right footing. Knowing what you don’t know is vital. This will save you untold trouble, time and money.