The Business of Data

The term platform is frequently cited in tech circles but often misunderstood. Google, Facebook and Amazon are the platform giants of the 21st century but what exactly is a platform, and should your company be building one? Like most questions, the answer is, “It depends” but if you are looking to expand your user base, build closer relationships with suppliers and want to make it more difficult for competitors to take market share then you should at least consider a platform strategy.When designed and executed correctly a platform can be a cost-effective way to scale your enterprise and build a sustainable and profitable business. As Accenture recently pointed out, the top 15 publicly quoted platform companies represent $2.6 trillion in market capitalization.To read this article in full, please click her […]

We all know the benefits that APIs can bring in getting the right data to the right people at the right time. There are enough tools out there to make offering API access to your data a relatively easy experience. However, a common problem has been too great a focus on sorting out the technical issues, often at the expense of building a compelling business case for having an API in the first place.A closer integration with core business objectives and the commercial needs of the organization can help design better APIs as well as increase the likelihood of internal funding approval. Here are five ways your company’s or product’s business model may benefit from incorporating an API.To read this article in full, please click her […]

Data is a core input to the insurance sector where it is used to calculate and put a price on risk. While established insurance brokers and underwriters may be experts in risk management, new entrants are leveraging new sources of data and analyzing it in ways which are transforming the sector. Incumbents have an advantage in terms of the data they already hold and the trusted brands they manage but a number of the largest firms are partnering with data-driven startups to create innovative products and services.4 key parts of the insurance value chain are being transformed by the application of data: customer prospecting, risk calculation, application process streamlining and the creation of new business and revenue models.To read this article in full, please click her […]

The IoT is based on the collection, manipulation and exchange of data. A key commercial driver for IoT investments is the value of this data in terms of how it can be deployed within business applications. Like any emerging market, liquidity is required to make it worthwhile for buyers and sellers of data to engage with each other. IoT data exchanges have a vital role to play in providing that liquidity.What are data exchanges? Just as stock markets allow the buying and selling of company shares, so data exchanges provide a platform for the commercial exchange of data between those creating it and companies needing it as an input to value-added services. The marketing industry has been using these for a number of years in the form of ad exchanges where data generated from cross-tracking web cookies is sold in real-time auctions to advertisers wishing to target online advertisements to individuals fitting specific targeting criteria. In 2017 it is estimated that over $63 billion was spent by marketers on this type of advertising.To read this article in full, please click her […]

We all know that data can be a company’s most important asset but managing it in the same way as other, more tangible, assets within the corporation is often neglected. Doug Laney, VP and Analyst at Gartner and author of Infonomics, points out: “Senior executives report to the board on the health of their workforce, their financials, their customers and their partnerships, but rarely the health of their information assets. Corporations typically exhibit greater discipline in tracking and accounting for their office furniture than their data.”In many ways this is inevitable as data, being hidden on hard drives and other storage media, is more difficult to manage than physical inventory, plant and buildings. This is particularly true for organizations whose core business is not centred on the gathering and exploitation of information. However, whatever your business it is almost certain you are sitting on undervalued and underused data assets which could be put to work. Let’s consider some examples of traditional businesses in established sectors which are extracting value from their data.To read this article in full, please click her […]

The days of launching products into the marketplace and incrementally improving them every few years with modifications and improvements to keep up with changing tastes and fashions is coming to an end. Customers are becoming more sophisticated as innovative companies engage in continuous improvements based on ever-increasing flows of data from users as they engage with products and services. One of the key objectives for any company should be to make sure they manage this data and that it is not under the control of a third party.Retail loyalty cards are a good example of this with retailers using the data captured to build rich pictures of their customers’ shopping habits and create stronger relationships. In the UK, the Boots pharmacy chain, a subsidiary of Walgreens in the US, claims more than 14 million users of its Advantage card and has one of the highest usage rates per transaction of any loyalty scheme. The company combines Advantage data with a range of third-party sources to improve its product offerings as well as determine where to open new stores.To read this article in full, please click her […]

Up to 90 percent of consumer-facing innovations fail in the marketplace with a slightly lower number for B2B products and services. Even Apple is not immune. The Apple Newton, the Apple xServe (anyone remember its rack-based server offering?) or its attempt at colonizing the early WWW with its eWorld online service all show innovation to be a difficult and costly business.Causes for data-driven innovation failure can vary from a bad product-market fit at launch to an inability to evolve products and services to meet changing technology and market needs. Throughout the 1990s, Yahoo! was a market leader via its directory-based system for navigating a relatively small web of information. As the WWW grew exponentially, this system no longer worked for users and a new way of efficiently searching for those relevant snippets of information was needed. Directory systems may have worked in an age of relative information scarcity but in an age of information abundance, discovery was what users wanted. Google capitalized on this with its PageRank algorithm and is now a $800 billion company. Yahoo! was sold to Verizon in 2016 for $5 billion, down from a peak market capitalization of $120 billion in 1999.To read this article in full, please click her […]