Data, Data, Data. Snowflake Summit and Salesforce World Tour
This week saw two big events from leading cloud players.
In Las Vegas Snowflake hosted their annual Summit event, while in London Salesforce’s World Tour rolled into town.
I’ll summarise both events in one sentence.
“If you don’t have a data strategy at the board level of your company you will fall behind.”
Technology is bringing data from the depths of the IT department, to the very heart of the boardroom as innovative companies across healthcare, financial services, retail and every sector uncover new ways that data can help them run their businesses more efficiently, service customers in a better way, and even to create new revenue streams.
Here are specific ideas you can think about at a non-technical level.
Take the work to the data
Snowflake’s Data Cloud allows companies to centralise all of their siloed data in a single platform - even though that data may reside across multiple clouds and multiple regions.
Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake says,
“You need to take the work to the data. If you bring the data to the work that’s where you create siloes.”
So get comfortable that your company will be generating thousands of new data sources - from your product, from your activities, from your vehicles, from your video, from your sensors - data everywhere - and through a platform like Snowflake you can have immediate access to all of this wherever it is stored.
Action: Understand the full extent of the first party data that your company is generating.
Merge with second and third party data
Don’t just think about your own data. Data clouds like Snowflake make it easy to access up to date second and third party data.
By second party we mean your data from your customers, partners, or other cloud providers - your Gong call recordings or Outreach email content which is available in Snowflake Marketplace without you having to build any integrations.
By third party we mean economic, demographic, weather, footfall, or health data being provided by dedicated data providers in the Snowflake Marketplace.
Pre-cloud this kind of data was either very expensive, very complex, or very out of date to access.
70% of Snowflake’s largest customers (spending over $1m per year) are using collaboration with other data partners - an average of 6 ‘edges’ per customer.
Action: Browse the Snowflake Marketplace and get to grips with the different types of second and third party data that are available. Whiteboard with your leadership team how these sources could complement your first party data.
Develop data applications
Snowflake launched their App Marketplace, where providers publish applications that use customer data without sharing that data with the publisher.
Consider a data analysis model for healthcare. A provider could develop their model and publish it. As a customer you can use that model without sharing your data, and you don’t have access to the source code of the publisher.
This will open the eyes of many companies to develop innovative ways for their customers to use their own data within their platform.
Every company is a data company. How can you help your customers to predict, analyse and decide using their own data?
Action: Consider how you could use your own data, combined with your customer’s data, to provide new products and drive new revenue streams.
Integrate data into AI applications
As Salesforce World Tour it was AI day - they discussed how they have been embedding AI in to every part of their platform.
I am pretty cynical when it comes to generative AI - I like writing for myself!
What I did find interesting was to see how Salesforce have developed an automated prompt platform that allows you to incorporate your customer’s information (maybe their product type, contract length and payment terms) into a prompt.
Salesforce Prompt Studio incorporates customer data
This could then be used with a Large Language Model to create a very personalised email from accounts payable or customer support.
Action: consider all the transactional and human generated customer communications you send, and assess how technology could improve the customer’s experience by blending their data and generative AI.
Develop a data operating model
Mihir Shah, CIO and Enterprise Head of Data Architecture at Fidelty discussed at Snowflake Summit that the technology is no longer the limiting factor for a data strategy - it is the operating model in terms of how you use that data to drive business change.
A phrase that Mihir used was “Data Liquidity” - every company is sat on data, but the question is how quickly you can turn that data into business value.
Fidelity have moved from 170 different siloes of data across different customer relationships into a single platform.
They have then created a new operating model covering data standards, ownership, sharing and chargebacks.
They operate it as an internal marketplace to data consumers across the business.
Action: develop a leadership structure that puts data at the senior leadership table and at the heart of your company strategy.
Get on the data innovation bus
Whenever I think about cloud platforms I think about getting on an innovation bus.
These companies are going to invest millions, billions, in advancing the technology they focus on, and just by being a customer you get to benefit from all of that learning.
Companies like these are hiring the best data science minds, pushing what is possible with the technology, and then packaging that up in easily consumable platforms.
As a business leader, I don’t believe you can have the excuse of “data is complicated, data is too technical, data is for our data team”.
Its your responsibility to understand these questions at an exec level:
What types of first, second and third party data do we have access to?
How could this data help us run our company better?
How can this data help us deliver a better service for our customers?
How can this data help us create new revenue streams for the business?
Which technology providers have got a vision of the future that aligns with ours?
Which technology providers have the ability to execute at the pace we want to go?
Which bus (or buses) do we want to get on board?
Have an opinion on these questions and it will ensure you are well positioned to capitalise on this exciting data future.
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