Harvest your data

All of us heard about bitcoin, the new money of digital world that is supposed to become the money of the future. Little do we realize that we ourselves are sitting over a goldmine, a goldmine of data. The companies which have found the magic wand are converting this data into commercially viable tangible asset and disrupting the way business is done. Those who fail to find use of their data may well start to prepare for bankruptcy. The days of business as usual has gone. Ability to use and monetize data is now impacting almost every industry that is in business.

Most companies realize that they have wealth of data. Many feel the data to be somewhat important, but few are aware on how to derive economic benefit out of the data. Situation of the business houses today are very similar to Mayan tribes. They have lots of gold, and even realize it to be valuable but is ignorant on how to derive benefit from its wealth. Even though many business are better at leveraging their data for their own purposes than they once were, the value of the data from an enterprise perspective has not been fully realized. Young Bang, VP of the civil health business at Booz Allen Hamilton, said in an interview, "I think the piece a lot of folks miss is: You need to understand the business so you can understand the value of the data and then [you can] monetize it".

Very often organization faces issues of data quality, changed environment, data confidentiality issues that restrict their ability to use data. Many times data is available in plain text or coded inaccurately. Data analytics help to reduce the errors by pattern searches. It can also use natural language processing engines to extract relevant information from plain text.  Analytics can also flag the document for potential error for further scrutiny.

Now-a-days many organization use surveys and social media sentiment analysis to better understand customer satisfaction levels. Analysis of past services can also help in this regard. For instance, if you know that a particular customer was allotted middle seat in her past 7 flights, you can jolly well deduce that she is pretty unsatisfied. You need to do something about such undeclared dissatisfaction otherwise the passenger may switch to some other airline. You don't need any costly survey to get such data. A simple analysis from your own data archive is all that is required to pull out such information.

Many companies are using the customer data to develop new product, expand their market. Many manufacturing company has supplemented their products with new offerings and create new value streams. For instance, a leading pharmaceutical retail chain in Kolkata used its customer data to launch medical insurance service. Another shop provided free weighing facility. It captured the customer data and used it to market a weight control package. Companies are not selling data to others, but instead using the data they have to provide new products and services. They are also using the data to price their product correctly and create new market segments.

Real value of data comes from combining different data. For instance real estate prices can indicate changing demographic profile in a locality. In turn, this can indicate latent demand for products and services. Using analytical algorithm, data scientists can pinpoint location that has such unfulfilled demand and help business to locate their outlets better.

Every business operates in its own way and their practices evolve over time.  More and more business run today on digital platform. New technologies, like IoT, RFID are making the products generate rich data that was not available in the past. These data, by themselves has no value. It require to be matched with some other data and analyzed to generate new meaning and discover new possibilities. The business that embraces these technologies and harvest their data will flourish.