Financial Services Governance Brainstorm

I call this a brain­storm because even though I will be shar­ing some of our best prac­tices in my blog series, the topic of gov­er­nance is so huge and so nuanced that nobody can pos­si­bly have all of the answers.  I’m going to try to boil some admit­tedly HUGE top­ics into pithy bul­lets.  My goal is to get the con­ver­sa­tion started.   Please share your thoughts on what’s worked and what hasn’t as you’ve worked to get your finan­cial ser­vices or insur­ance com­pany orga­nized around a uni­fied dig­i­tal strategy.

HUGE Topic #1 – Who Should Own your Web Ana­lyt­ics & Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Tools?

Let’s get right to it shall we?  Too often Finan­cial Ser­vices com­pa­nies start out by giv­ing own­er­ship of their Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools to IT.  More sea­soned and suc­cess­ful Fin­Serv com­pa­nies will gen­er­ally move the own­er­ship from IT to another group or they had a great place fit for their Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools from the start.  I mean no offence to IT and cer­tainly don’t intend to imply that IT shouldn’t be a key player in your dig­i­tal strat­egy, how­ever I agree with Avinash Kaushik of Google Ana­lyt­ics when he tweeted the following:

Let me ensure that I’m clear on this topic.  Imple­men­ta­tions are exe­cuted by IT, but I argue that the own­er­ship of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools, the deci­sions on what should/shouldn’t be measured/tested/optimized, and the over­all own­er­ship of the suc­cess­ful deploy­ment of the tools should be out­side of IT.

First of all why does IT often own dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools in Finan­cial Ser­vices com­pa­nies?  I think that there are two reasons.

1. Imple­men­ta­tion:  Although the key audi­ence for Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools are typ­i­cally the ecom­merce and mar­ket­ing teams, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools typ­i­cally require involve­ment from IT upfront and often times requires their con­tin­u­ous main­te­nance involve­ment.  Since IT imple­ments the tool, it often falls on them to own that imple­men­ta­tion.  IT there­fore becomes the gate­keep­ers of the tool.
2. Cen­tral­ized:  Like the web­site itself, IT is cen­tral­ized and their scope spans the entire bank.  How many pow­er­ful arms are there in a Fin­Serv com­pany that span all lines of busi­ness?  Often there aren’t any.  The web­site and the online strat­egy has to span all lines of busi­ness and there­fore IT becomes a more “cen­tral­ized” owner.

Why wouldn’t IT be the best place for your web ana­lyt­ics tool?  They are in charge of deploy­ing it after all.  I see the prob­lem as one of align­ment.  And when I say align­ment I mean IT’s align­ment with the pur­poses of the tools they are imple­ment­ing.  While IT’s goals are cer­tainly aligned with the inter­ests of the company’s, they are often not per­fectly aligned with the end users of the tools.  Some exam­ples of typ­i­cal issues that will often come up when Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools are owned by IT:

• Busi­ness require­ments may not be cor­rectly or thor­oughly taken and there­fore key reports may be missing
• Imple­men­ta­tions often get too gran­u­lar (cap­ture every­thing just in case and let the busi­ness sort it out later) or not gran­u­lar enough (the same basic tags are deployed on every page with­out required cus­tomiza­tion to save costs)
• Lack of adop­tion among the lines of busi­ness (lack of report dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy and a train­ing strategy)
• In his new book, Web Ana­lyt­ics Action Hero Brent Dykes describes the need to get out of “Imple­men­ta­tion Land” and move into “Action Land.”  This is often delayed and at times never hap­pens under IT ownership.

So where should your Ana­lyt­ics tool sit?  I don’t think that there is any one best answer for a Finan­cial Ser­vices com­pany.  The obvi­ous cri­te­ria would be a cen­tral­ized team that is aligned with dri­ving busi­ness results.  Our most suc­cess­ful cus­tomers will usu­ally align their own­er­ship in the Global Mar­ket­ing or eCom­merce organizations.

I know that there are a lot of Fin­Serv com­pa­nies out there who have run into the issues described above.  Per­haps some of you are see­ing these issues but haven’t been able to sort out the root of the prob­lem yet.  Maybe there’s even some­one read­ing who shat­ters the ter­ri­ble IT stereo­type that I’ve laid out here.  I’d love to hear about your experiences.

In my next post I’ll dive deeper into how your Finan­cial Ser­vices com­pany can best orga­nize itself around Dig­i­tal Marketing.