The Value of Data

Data is the currency of digital enterprise. The fuel of technology, its influx and exchange power the digital capability to market products, reach and engage customers, manage business operations, and perform countless other functions. And because data is typically retained rather than expended in the process, it accumulates into vast, dynamic stockpiles of granularized digital fact.

The intrinsic financial value of these stockpiles can be seen in the goodwill gap between the market values of companies built on data, like Twitter and Uber, and their actual market value. According to Forbes, as of May 2015, Facebook was valued at $200 billion, while United Airlines, a company that owns and operates tangible objects of value, most notably a large fleet of passenger jets, was valued at $34 billion.

Beyond its financial valuation, and especially in today’s world of big data and analytics, your data represents as well a latent reserve of potential competitive advantage. Analysis, interpretation, and correlation render raw data into useful information that can guide strategy, drive innovation, enrich customer engagement, and even contribute to the top line. The business value of data is limited only by the ingenuity and insight with which it’s rendered into information.

Enabling The Alchemy of Digital Enterprise

Given the practically limitless potential of data, this ongoing rendering process—from disconnected and uninterpreted facts and figures into usable, illuminative information—deserves the full weight of an organization’s collective creative insight. In order to accomplish this, its people need to be as comfortable and up-close with the data as possible. This requires that data be secure, easily accessible, and usably formatted. Data stewardship involves storing, securing, and formatting data to enable and facilitate the coordinated analytical attention most likely to yield competitively valuable insight. While IT departments have taken the lead in data stewardship, particularly around security and maintenance, it’s a responsibility shared across the entire digital enterprise.

Transforming Our Thinking

Digital transformation entails a change in our thinking, as we reimagine the relationships between people and technology, and the business models through which they interact. This includes a transformed understanding of the value of data and people’s relationships with it. Effective data stewardship flows from a deep organizational understanding of its critical importance, rooted in an informed and committed embrace of the potential breadth and scale of data’s value. Enabling data stewardship starts with fostering an organizational mindset that prioritizes fulfilling the promise of data and with engendering a culture in which everyone is creatively engaged in leveraging it towards competitive advantage.

AVIO

Let AVIO Consulting help you leverage your data into a greater competitive advantage by reshaping the way you understand and interact with it. We are digital transformation specialists, and our passion is helping companies like yours become agile, efficient digital enterprises, adept at turning data into information; and information into enlightened strategy, disruptive innovation, and meaningful customer engagement. Contact us today.