Josh Melick is an influential tech entrepreneur who boasts extensive experience as an engineer. To date, the venture-backed business which he founded Broadly, has successfully raised over $20 million dollars to develop innovative new tools which will allow businesses to better communicate with their customers and target audiences.
In recent years the complexity of systems of records in business has increased as the industry as a whole has begun to enforce strict new compliance regulations surrounding the storage and use of client data. Due to the new regulations, it’s now more important than ever for businesses to be able to track their clients’ data. As many businesses have struggled to adapt to the new regulations that have sought advice from Josh Melick as he has a wealth of knowledge on how they can adapt their businesses processes to adhere to the new data regulations.
Systems of Record
Melick’s first piece of advice to businesses is to actively take steps to limit the number of systems that they use on a day-to-day business. As once data is shared between numerous business systems, it can be hard for software engineers to pinpoint the origin and ownership of individual pieces of data. Which is now a legal requirement for most businesses. Although Melick does acknowledge that it’s impossible for businesses to streamline their software applications too much and that a compromise must be made.
Melick also advises businesses to carefully select a master system to link each system to. As if every system is properly linked to a master system, businesses’ software engineers should be able to easily track down the origin of each piece of data that a business has collated over the years. Examples of which may include the contact details of their clients and the details of individual transactions which have taken place in the last calendar year.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail to link each of their systems to a master system and as many systems may not have a variety of export options it may be a tedious, time-consuming process for software engineers to try and match data between multiple systems.
Melick also recommends that businesses learn to use Salesforce in order to automate the mapping of data throughout their network of systems. While Melick admits that Salesforce isn’t a cheap investment, he highly recommends it for businesses of all sizes. As it’s an investment that is likely to pay off in the long term. Especially as many thriving companies across different industries have successfully built their companies using Salesforce.
If businesses follow all of Melick’s tips on tracking the ownership of data, he is confident that they will have no trouble adhering to the new data regulations which have taken the business industry by storm in the past few years.
