Global
Organizations are generating truckloads of data – about customer behavior, sales, internal operations, unstructured comments from social media, and the like. Turning this raw data into valuable information is the key challenge companies face in gaining competitive advantage and identifying new revenue streams. Many of the world’s largest companies don’t own physicals assets or manufacture physical products, but are highly valued because they have turned data into revenue. The goal is to unlock the value of your data.
In his presentation at the World Digital Transformation Conference on the topic, How to Turn Data into Revenue, Savings and New Business, Mark Lister, Chief Digital Officer, Ness Digital Engineering, shares useful insights on how every organization can use its data to predict future opportunities and create a valuable ecosystem for its customers.
He also reveals real cases of organizations disrupting their markets with data and offers key lessons for companies forming data strategies or data monetization plans.
For example, Mark highlights two important questions businesses should be able to answer while putting together a data monetization strategy: “who is going to pay for this data?” and “why would they care enough to pay?” He emphasizes that “To monetize data or make it useful to the outside world, you need to imbue data with relevance and purpose so that it becomes information that people can use and do meaningful things with.”
Mark also shares the story of Zillow, a real estate property valuation platform in the US. The company started in 2006 and in 2016, its revenue stood at $850 + million dollars and increasing (considering it is buying a lot of its competitors to be the major player in the space). Zillow used house-value data that was locked up in groups across the US, and integrated that with open-source government statistics such as the number of houses, house building data, etc. to provide a valuation for every house in the US. Using a feature on its website called a “Zestimate” users can find out how much their houses are worth, compare house prices, and make decisions about the trade-offs of staying in place or moving. Before 2006, there was no way to do that in the US. So, Zillow disrupted the market and enhanced its revenues by adding meaningful information to its data and making it relevant to people.
Mark also hints at the future possibilities for the company, “If we look further ahead, the data on performance of school districts, hospitals, crime rate etc. and other changing trends, like people working from home, driverless cars, and the like reflect on the way property prices change. So, there is even more value locked in there that they even know about at the moment.”
He suggests steps that organizations can take to unearth and shape data opportunities.
Companies often become too focused on ‘their data’ and fail to take a holistic view of the combinations of elements that can determine its true value. An outside partner can bring in fresh perspectives and offer an all-around view on the real worth of the data to the external world and a roadmap for using data to maximize business opportunities.
Watch the video to learn more about unlocking the business value of data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9moChuTZ1U&t=63s
