Over the last couple of months, the Republican party has been doing an in-depth postmortem on their 2012 loss. In the report published by the RNC earlier this week, the number one area identified for improvement was: Data Analytics. It’s a broad term, but, in essence, it means getting better information — for example, who your supporters could be and how to make them vote — and the technology to analyze it.
At first blush, this seems like a surprising area to focus on. But in looking a little more carefully at the on-the-ground capabilities gap between the parties, the importance of analytics, mobile apps and integration really starts to stand out.
Power in the Palm of a Canvasser’s Hand
One example of this gap in capabilities played out at the foot soldier level. The Democrats deployed a mobile canvasing app that integrated public data (voter rolls, demographics), geolocation, analytics and predictive modeling to multiply the effectiveness on neighborhood canvassers. This disruptive take on a decades-old political activity that completely rewrote both the process used as well as the effectiveness of individual canvassers.
No longer did volunteers need to go to the local campaign office to get a static, often outdated, paper-based list of prospects and guess at the pitch to use at the door. Instead, the canvassers were provided real-time data and tested, individually recommended scripts based on analytics. Game changer. As the Republicans rightly recognized this week, this difference in individual effectiveness could be the difference in winning or losing a presidential election.
An Integration Story
The power that integration brings to mobile technology is really the core of this story. That awesome, responsive, front end took planning and solid infrastructure to deliver the vision and ultimately, the win. This doesn’t happen by accident and requires a carefully planned, mobile-centric architecture. The good news is that approaches, best practices and architecture are rapidly evolving to support these types of apps. On Wednesday, TIBCO will be releasing a video with Forrester’s Michael Facemire, The Mobile Impact on Enterprise Architecture and Development.
For more, watch these webinars discussing how you can become the CIO, Chief Integration Officer.
