George L’Heureux:
Hello everyone. This is Data Talks presented by Dun & Bradstreet. I'm your host, George L'Heureux. I'm a Principal Consultant for Data Strategy and the Advisory Services team here at Dun & Bradstreet. And in advisory services, our team is dedicated to helping our clients maximize the value of their relationship with Dun & Bradstreet through expert advice and consultation. And on Data Talks, I chat each episode with one of the expert advisors at Dun & Bradstreet about a topic that can help the consumers of our data and services to get more value. Today's guest expert is Peter Voutsinas. Peter is a Data Advisor within Dun & Bradstreet. And Peter, how long have you been with the company?
Peter Voutsinas:
I've actually been with Dun & Bradstreet for most of my business career, coming up on 30 years. Within those 30 years, I've spent about half that time in our data and analytics roles in our data analytics side of the business, as well as the other half being spent in business development and sales leadership. So in addition to gaining the comprehensive knowledge that I have around our data and analytics, I've also been able to see the impact of how customers benefit from those services and solutions that we offer. Additionally, I spent five years outside of Dun & Bradstreet in roles where in some cases I had access to Dun & Bradstreet services, in some roles I didn't. So I gained a keen appreciation of how those services can either help you or inhibit you from meeting your own strategic goals in those roles.
George L’Heureux:
So can you tell me a little bit about what you're doing in your current role as a data advisor?
Peter Voutsinas:
Absolutely. In my current role, I support a portfolio of strategic customers, primarily in the RTM space or retail, manufacturing, transportation. And in that role, I consult and advise customers on how to use our data, education around our data, making recommendations on how they can apply those solutions and services to things such as MDM and also working on how those apply to the different enterprise areas like credit and risk, sales and marketing, and supply and comply.
George L’Heureux:
So one of the things that we had wanted to talk about and that we have the opportunity to do that today is hierarchies. Now, this is something that we talk about with our clients all the time, and they're also known as corporate family trees. They're a real big part of a lot of master data efforts, but why are hierarchies so important?
Peter Voutsinas:
I think the first thing to think about is the way you use them is really informed and inseparable from the use case. So when you start talking about hierarchies, there seems to be a tendency when I work with my customers to simplify them. In fact, customers who are using data integrators usually get the advice to over-simplify and try and create a very one size fits all use case. We recommend that for a host of reasons.
George L’Heureux:
So this one size fits all hierarchy strategy, can you tell me what some of the benefits of it might be that gets it recommended so much and what are some of the cons that really maybe cause it not to be as useful as people might think?
Peter Voutsinas:
You know, from the benefits, and I certainly understand where the integrators are coming from, the idea is to try and get the data into something, for example, like an MDM platform. So get the data ingested and create your baseline platform. However, if you don't take the next step, which is to really understand the complexity of hierarchies, you may be missing or not getting the full picture of whether you're putting customers in your database or you're doing prospecting. So you may actually, that simplification may actually result in you missing the insight that could be valuable for the use case you're trying to, you know, the outcome you're trying to get from a use case.
George L’Heureux:
So in what you've just said, it sounds like there are kind of different insights that different groups inside our clients, their enterprises might be looking for from the same set of hierarchy data. Can you give me an example of how these groups would view or use hierarchy data differently?
Peter Voutsinas:
Sure. And I'll go back and you may hear me say the word use case quite often. It's very critical. So for example, if we were to look at the different enterprises, credit and risk may have a view that they needed their customers for their use case. Sales and marketing may have a completely different need and need a different view for their use cases. Same with a supply and complier vendor master use cases. And then of course you may have a business planning or just an overall overarching MDM strategy, which may also have a completely different need for views. To try and create a one size fits all that would accommodate all those different views is a fairly mighty task and one that's not easily achieved.
George L’Heureux:
So with that in mind, we have lots of clients, lots of different use cases and business goals that they're trying to achieve. How do you, when you're doing this consulting work, usually approach trying to figure out what the right type of strategy is to recommend while still trying to keep it as simple as you can, because obviously that's something that clients still care about as well.
Peter Voutsinas:
Sure. The first thing is ask questions. Again, what is your use case? What is your desired outcome? Why is it that you have a need to identify and understand hierarchies. To go back to what we talked about with the different enterprise group, you know when you ask those questions, the folks in credit and risk may say, "Our main goal is to be able to understand the full impact and risk within a family tree, whether it's rolled up to see the total exposure and potential risk, or whether it's right down to an individual entity." So being able to see that view.
Peter Voutsinas:
However, you talk to sales and marketing and their use case is entirely different. They may want to assess white space. They may want to use it to segment, to do lead generation, they may want to use it to do sales territory rationalization. Again, totally different use case. And you can go on suppliers have the same to be able to recognize the risks in their supply chain or certifier vendors or compliance. So again, may need a totally different view. Some may meet very discriminant views in the hierarchy and several players, and some may just need a very simplified rolled up view, but typically they're all very different, very unique. And in some cases get to the point where customization may be the solution for identifying and creating hierarchies.
George L’Heureux:
I find your answer really interesting because I think that it reveals that with a lot of these tough questions in data management, more generally, the answer is "it depends." And let's look at your use cases. I mean, working backward like that, it really is important when you're dealing with something that's complex.
Peter Voutsinas:
Absolutely. And you know, again, we talked before, I support the retail manufacturing industry, what may work for those views and their needs for hierarchy may not work if, for example, if I was supporting financial services or tech or other industries. So while there's some broad categories, I think we're all familiar with credit and risk, supply, compliant vendor and sales and marketing. You know, there's some very high level goals that all these enterprises aspire to that can vary very differently when you get down to the use cases and down the specific industry needs and the customer base that they're working with or prospect base.
George L’Heureux:
So you kind of touched on it a minute ago. I maybe want to dive in a little bit more around this natural friction that exists between trying to keep things simple, and at the same time allow yourself to roll up to a certain degree and narrow in on a particular entity or set of entities. Can you give me some examples around how different industries that have different verticals are approaching these types of headaches that they need to resolve?
Peter Voutsinas:
Sure. Again, I think when we talk about, again, I'll say the word use case, when we talk about what those specific entities do, the outcomes are from that they're trying to do from the hierarchies is once you understand that goal, what does my hierarchy look like? What do I need to find out? What am I seeing? What am I not seeing? Again, going back to that example of the credit risk, the friction you speak of balancing that roll-up view for an entire family versus that view of the single entity, where maybe you have a lot or a little exposure, but it's still contributes to that overall risk, being able to identify that. And what's your ability? Are you doing that yourself? Are you deriving those hierarchies yourself? Are you getting that information third party? And how do you know you're getting the correct insight and you're getting that correct view for that outcome.
George L’Heureux:
And you've kind of talked about how having a variety or some different hierarchy views can help that and maybe improve upon the idea of a one size fits all strategy. Can you give me some insight into what do these different hierarchy views look like?
Peter Voutsinas:
Absolutely. So you can look at views. So conventional when most people think of hierarchy, they think of corporate hierarchy, which is basically driven from a legal standpoint from stock majority ownership. So often when you talk to customers about hierarchy, that's what they're familiar with and that's what they know. But that's not the only hierarchy, especially as we've seen the business landscape change right now. Things like the gig economy and e-commerce, and just the overall and globalization have really contributed to a shift in how hierarchies and enterprise view, and even how an enterprise itself operates. As we talked about the different groups and the different use cases, they have a very unique and not necessarily the same in overlap. So, the ability to tailor that to what your need is, is why it's so important to understand how you're deriving these hierarchies. Are you doing it yourself. In cases where we see customers try it themselves or customize, we tend to run into a lot of frustration and what we call hierarchy headaches.
George L’Heureux:
We've talked about a couple of those before, and I imagine whether or not you're building it yourself, whether or not you're focusing on just the corporate hierarchy, you are something different than extends into things like franchises or alternative ways of being associated. That's going to impact how well you're able to actually address those use cases that we spoke about. Not to say use cases again.
Peter Voutsinas:
Absolutely. Well, let's take an example of that. So if we look at a company, well-known company, like the Toyota Corporation, you've got Toyota Motor Corporation, which is a corporate entity and all of the various divisions and arms that would roll up in that corporate family. However, if your use case also entails that you need to see franchises, typically franchises is selling a brand or a name like Toyota aren't necessarily associated with the Toyota corporate family. They are typically owned by the franchisee. So you may want to see that exposure, but if you are only looking at corporate linkage, you would not derive that if you didn't also look at the alternative linkage relationship. We talk about alternative linkage. Some other examples are the government, universities, and businesses and industries that are not generally dictated by legal or stock ownership.
George L’Heureux:
Yeah, you had the example of Toyota. I think of other industries, like a lot of hotels and ShoreTels, a lot of quick service restaurants. They follow that same franchise model.
Peter Voutsinas:
Sure. And in some of those companies, what they're actually doing is they are not owning any more of those locations. They're franchising everything out. So the actual locations and entity and stores are actually not owned by those companies. They just supply the goods and services and the branding. So if were trying to get that higher exposure, the challenge is how do I make sure I'm including all those views? How do I know if the McDonald's is part of the McDonald's corporate family? Or how do I know if it's just a standalone entity owned by somebody in my hometown.
George L’Heureux:
So you pose that great rhetorical question. And let me pose one back to you that isn't rhetorical. How does Dun & Bradstreet help? How does someone like you help a client who's looking at that situation and has to figure out how to resolve it.
Peter Voutsinas:
Well, again, once we've learned and understand the use case and what the customer's outcome is, we can then look at the data that they have. We'll look at what they're seeing, look at what's working, take that information, add some of Dun & Bradstreet's different hierarchy views, and see if we can derive a better picture or meet the outcome that they're working for. So, in that last example, if they do want to see the extended family of Toyota franchises, our alternative linkage combined with the corporate language would help a customer get that view. And then you can use those for applications like understanding white space, understanding the nature of the relationship, understanding buying opportunities. And those I've mentioned are sales and marketing applications. Or if we were to go back to credit and risk, understanding your risk and exposure and the associations between a dealer versus your relationship with the corporate entity.
George L’Heureux:
So this is all information that is for the most part out there. It's not that it can't be found somewhere. It's mostly public. Why wouldn't companies just go and do this themselves? Why turn to a place like Dun & Bradstreet to get this information?
Peter Voutsinas:
The challenge is based on how you derive that. So if you were just trying to identify that via a name or name and address match, you can run into a whole lot of issues where the company may not be using a brand name, or you may not be able to derive that association or you may get multiple returns and not be able to understand where that entity sits in the corporate family. Dun & Bradstreet through our D-U-N-S number are able to link all those together and show you what those relationships are, whether it's in a corporate structure or we can show you parent, headquarter, child relationships, or whether we can link that alternative brand or franchise relationship for you. So we're able to do that via the D-U-N-S Number and our process of how we show customers hierarchy through how we derive hierarchy in our commercial database.
George L’Heureux:
Peter, great information. As we wrap up, what's the one thing you might want people who are watching this or listening to this, to walk away from, from our conversation today.
Peter Voutsinas:
Well, you might have heard this before, but your hierarchy of needs have to be driven by use case. So, what is the output? What is the outcome you're looking for? What is the use case specific to your enterprise or your initiative and what is the outcome you're looking for? A good barometer of that is if one of your data end users feels like they're missing something, they probably are. So in that case, we can help you assess those and provide insight around hierarchy and help you meet those outcomes.
George L’Heureux:
Well, thanks, Peter. I really appreciate you sitting down and sharing some of your expertise and your knowledge around this topic today.
Peter Voutsinas:
My pleasure, George, thank you.
George L’Heureux:
Our guest expert today has been Pete Voutsinas, a Data Advisor at Dun & Bradstreet. And this has been Data Talks. We hope you've enjoyed today's discussion. And if you have, I encourage you to please share it with a friend or a colleague. And if you'd like more information about things that we've discussed on today's episode, please visit www.dnb.com or reach out to your company's Dun & Bradstreet specialist today. I'm George L'Heureux. Thanks for joining us. Until next time.
