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BDA is the new four-letter words for CMOs because they’ve very little idea and experience in understanding the infrastructure and applications that make the execution framework. In fact, this week’s big news the merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks have little impact to the CMOs – nope they’re not ignorant, actually, they are clueless!

I’m saying this based on the interaction with a bunch of CMOs and marketing heads coupled with my very own experience in the field of marketing. BDA practice are welcomed, and its benefit is well understood but CMOs are clueless when it’s come to the infrastructure and applications needed to achieve it thus most of them tend to procrastinate. This situation is so similar to the Prince of Denmark – ‘Hamlet’, chronic procrastination has paralyzed his action and cost him a kingdom as well as dearest lives.

The current state of affair – the CMOs are being haunted by BDA ghost!

I have a couple of tips on how to break the chronic procrastination that CMOs developed to embrace BDA practice: –

• CMOs are the new breed of CIOs. Never stop learning, keep your mind sharp by learning new things and this time you’ve to learn the role and skills of CIOs. The more you learn on CIO skills, the more confident you’ll be in co-navigation the BDA practice.
• If you are afraid of heavy enterprise architectures, then opt for a small pilot on the cloud. There are plenty of options available from Amazon, Google and IBM are offering “Hadoop -As-A-Service”, so brace yourself with guts and explore the possibilities.
• At the time of writing, BDA is incomplete without Artificial Intelligence (AI) infusion. While Hadoop ecosystem is widely adopted as a basis for BDA, last few years have seen the massive shift with organizations heavily investing into AI to tackle workloads. Be in the game and be the game!
• Build a team, combining IT security, resilience, cloud architects, ethnographers and creative thinkers. Radical combinations but will push through your BDA practice at speed of thought.
• CIO is your new natural partner. You’ve to work along with CIOs to make BDA practice a reality. You need to wake up to the fact that technology (and rocket science) is fundamentally changing what marketers do and IT can’t be treated as a back-office function. It’s worth a gain to get your relationship with CIOs upended.

Before you grapple with the BDA practice problems, you need to accept and be conscious about it. The acceptance will kill off the chronic procrastination you are facing with embarking BDA practice journey. You’ve to kill Claudius immediately and avoid facing self-doubt and anxiety like Hamlet.

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