The 7 questions to answer before you touch Data Cloud

Every prospective Data Cloud client we engage with goes through the same seven questions before we agree to scope anything. If you cannot answer four of them confidently, you are not ready, and a six-figure license will not fix that. Here are the seven, in order.

The seven questions

1. 1What is the single use case that justifies this purchase on its own?
2. 2Who owns the unified profile, in writing, after go-live?
3. 3Which downstream system is the first activation target, and is its API contract stable?
4. 4What does data quality look like in the worst source system feeding the lake?
5. 5Do you have a real-time use case, or is daily ingestion sufficient?
6. 6Who has authority to deprecate the duplicate systems Data Cloud will replace?
7. 7What is the kill criteria, when would you walk away?

“Answer those seven before the demo. The companies that do, get value out of Data Cloud in 90 days. The ones that don't are still tuning ingestion 18 months later.”

The question behind the questions

Each of the seven is really probing the same thing: is your organization politically and architecturally ready to consolidate. Data Cloud is a consolidation product disguised as an ingestion product. The hardest part is not the data plumbing, it is the deprecation conversation that follows.