Exclusives

All companies today — not just in media and entertainment — are looking to have a better understanding of their customers. And to facilitate that means getting the most value out of the data in front of you as possible.

But bringing data of all kinds (including metadata, product data, usage, etc.) together in one place — and knowing where that data comes from and how to use it — means employing data governance, and it’s something companies across every industry are still struggling with, according to Tim Padilla, director of consulting, west, for MarkLogic.

“You’re looking for unified, actionable and governed data, which means it’s trustable,” Padilla said, speaking Nov. 20 during the webinar “You’re Doing it Wrong! Why Data Governance Currently Sucks and What You Can Do About It.” “In media and entertainment specifically, it means experiences. It’s not only delivering a great experience, it’s delivering a continually great experience. And that’s all done with data.”

But while it’s easy to talk about the need to deliver great experiences, consumers still have difficulty finding content and differentiating between services. Tailored one-on-one experiences that provide a connection need data to occur, Padilla said. Data is still siloed in different systems, and there are organizational and systems boundaries. Data integration is needed to bring it all together. And chances are, you’re not going about that the right way.

“You need to know what the data is upfront, and design rules for bringing the data in,” Padilla said. “There’s technology, there’s effort, and then there’s organizational acts. When the change happens, you can wind up in this [repetitive] cycle. Requirements are changing, your data sources are changing, and you need to be able to have an environment where you don’t have to go through this cycle over and over again.”

Define your database model upfront, and deal with the pain around enterprise data integration now, he added. That means having all your data in one place, employing tools that are inherently agile, and that relieve the organizational challenge and effort of governance. The benefits around MarkLogic’s platform center on its ability to ingest data and then do the work for you, thanks to its use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, according to Michael Malgeri, principal technologist for the company. Taking a data-first, data-centric approach removes the burdens of data governance, he said.

MarkLogic’s Data Hub service — a database server with an integrated search engine — makes sure the data from all sources

“I think we all know that data sources can be endless, and they’re going to continue to change,” Malgeri said. “On the downstream you have to serve up this data, you have operational processes that need analytics … there are changes both upstream and down, and organizations need to respond to that, to customer desires.

“That all happens in the middle, and that’s where we situate MarkLogic.”