Giving Marketers Access to Data

In the HBR.  Well put, its not only getting them access, but also useful access.  In a form they can understand and can leverage.  That starts with data visualization.   See also Procter's 1 Consumer Place.    And fundamentally:

" .... Marketers these days can capture and analyze sales patterns in minute detail. They can geolocate customers and mine transaction histories. They can see patterns emerge from wholly new information streams, such as what people are saying about the company on social media. Because much of the data flows into a company in real time, they can also see what their customers are up to right now.

That’s the way it works in theory, anyway. In practice, all this data usually sits in different places — a company’s legacy CRM systems, its loyalty program databases, new cloud-based applications, third-party servers, and so on. That makes it hard to access. Sometimes marketers must wait in line to get the data they need served up to them by IT. ... "