Releasing the pent-up value of businesses’ data: uniting capabilities and organisational components

In the first blog in this two-part series, I looked at the global explosion in data volumes – and the trends emerging in data analytics and processing as the marketplace responds. In this second blog I’ll go on to examine what steps companies can and should take to realise the full value of their data assets as these developments play out.

 Let me start with a proviso. As organisations across all industries face up to the expanding mass of data, many find themselves at an inflexion point in terms of their own IT systems. Like the helpful local who begins their directions by saying “I wouldn’t start from here,” a lot of companies are not exactly in the best place to begin the journey.

 Why? Because for years – in some cases decades – the emphasis has been on building large business systems, often requiring significant investment in applications and technology.  Whilst initially delivering value to business they have resulted in a complex information landscape with large, expensive data stores, generating batch reports that often come too late and contain data that people don’t trust.  In many cases this has spawned a host of ‘shadow’ reporting teams trying to create their own versions in spreadsheets.  This is a long way from an environment able to cope with today’s data-rich business environment, dominated by huge information volumes, high speed change and predictive analytics.

 So, to position themselves to release the value from their data, companies must first go through a transition and transformation. This involves ensuring that not only their data, but also their systems, people, processes and organisation, are in the right shape to enable data to be managed and delivered as-a-service to their customers and employees – while also providing an agile and flexible data platform to support current and future uses.

 The four capabilities of effective data management

 As companies navigate this transformation, I believe there are four capabilities they must have in place to ensure success. The first is data laboratories to undertake experimentation, innovation and proofs of concept. The second is skills and knowledge in data science, to build advanced analytics capabilities. The third is more traditional business management information, to help them run the business and meet requirements such as regulatory compliance.

 And the fourth – most basic, yet essential – capability is around the data itself: the ability to understand and manage it, including knowing where it’s come from, how clean it is, who needs it, and what the company’s going to use it for.

 To deliver these capabilities effectively, businesses need to start thinking about their data on an enterprise wide basis. Business and technology silos need to be broken down and the enormous amount of data that is already being generated across organisations needs to be exposed.

The road ahead

That’s the journey of data discovery that lies ahead for today’s organisations. But crucially, to reach the destination, every step and every item of investment along the way must be explicitly tied to business value. Because rather than being an end in itself, data analytics is a means to an end.

 And that end is to realise the value in the organisation’s information – its intellectual property – in the most appropriate and effective way, both to drive efficiencies and revenues today, and also to pinpoint and seize new opportunities to monetise data tomorrow. Think mobile operators generating new revenues by selling customer location data to marketing companies or going one step further and working with partners to create whole new businesses.

 I began this series of blogs by saying I believe companies should make information and analytics the primary focus of how they run their business, make decisions and engage with customers. Today’s tools, capabilities and technologies put this reality within reach. In my view, tomorrow’s winners will be those organisations that seize it.