A preflight checklist is a vital tool for ensuring a safe flight. Pilots routinely use a written checklist to confirm fuel and hydraulic fluid levels, to inspect for damage or obstructions, manage trim settings and flight controls and perform other safety checks. Invaluable for avoiding preventable accidents, the practice clears a flight for takeoff.
The concept similarly applies to data readiness. To avoid downstream problems with inferior data or data that has not been validated for its intended purpose, IT professionals, marketers and business users of customer data need to have faith that data has been put through its paces so that it will get them where they want to go.
In this series on the six pillars of data readiness, we’ve discussed what it takes to make sure that data is right, i.e., that it is complete, accurate and timely. When those criteria are met, the next step is to make sure that customer data is actionable. The engines are firing and you’re ready to start rolling down the runway.
Data is actionable when it is meaningful, accessible, and available at the right time for the right purpose.
Actionable and Metadata
Actionable means a few different things. One is that customer data is formatted and semantically tied in such a way that it’s meaningful in the context in which you will use it. This is important for AI. For instance, if AI is given a field that says “Name” what does that mean? Is it a product name? A person? If the latter, is it a full name, just the last name, etc. “Name” as a standalone word does not reveal much. The same holds true for other entries, such as denominations. If someone paid 50.00 for a product, is that in U.S. dollars, Euros or another value? (As an aside, a mistaken fuel conversion using pounds/liter instead of kilograms/liter caused Air Canada Flight 142 – aka the “Gimli Glider” – to run out of fuel halfway to Edmonton and crash land on a racetrack.)
The Six Pillars of Data Readiness: Actionable
The need for a common understanding highlights the importance of metadata in making customer data actionable. Metadata provides the relationships and rules for managing data flow, analysis and activation in a data readiness hub. It provides a contextual framework for customer data in terms of the how, what, when, where, and why the data is being collected and used, e.g., creating a golden record, GenAI, etc.
Actionable and Accessibility
Data being actionable also refers to its accessibility. The act of collecting data into a database without appropriate metadata or APIs just pushes the problem downstream. Being complete, accurate, and timely are separate goals from making data properly available to any system that needs it.
There are a few ways to look at accessibility in this context. One is to have APIs that are meaningful and useful so if someone wants to pull the data they can. Another is to have an appropriate set of metadata documentation to allow someone to perform queries directly on the database that will give them what they need. That is typically what AI will want to do.
A third is to make sure that data pushed out to an external source is meant for that specific source. This ties into the concept of data being trusted, a topic we will explore in greater depth in the next blog in this series. The reason data being actionable and being trusted are related is because some of the data being made accessible may be PII or PHI data. In this case, accessibility must be both specific and limited – with rules in place for who has a right to access and use the data, make a copy, etc. The recipient – the user – needs to understand (and abide by) any limitations in place. These limitations may both be regulatory in nature – GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc. – or set by a customer through permissions. In short, data provided through an API must be shared in such a way that it is used for the right purpose.
Actionable and Timeliness
A final point on making data actionable is the role of timeliness. Any access points and/or API’s need to work in the cadence of the customer flow, which may mean only passing through parts of the profile record to speed up its transit, or in connecting technologies in a way that is scalable and cost effective for that cadence. Timeliness in this sense is distinct from its role in building the unified customer profile, which we covered as one of the six pillars.
Essentially, the role of timeliness as it relates to data being actionable refers to putting data to work at exactly the right moment. This means timeliness of access and activation, making sure the right data is available to the right system or person, in the right context and at the right time.
A real-time, up-to-date unified profile has little value if the systems that need it – AI engines, personalization tools, marketing platforms – can’t access or act on it in real time. Making data actionable means ensuring that timeliness extends all the way through to activation, not just ingestion or transformation.
Learn how Redpoint helps ensure your customer data is not just available—but actionable across every channel in real time: Data Readiness for AI, CX and more.
