The Data Asset

With the emergence of new business innovations and new forms of competition, catalyzed by advances in digitization, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things or robotics - the capability to manage data as a corporate asset is now critical, allowing to yield the full potential of these new technologies to enable the competitive edge, that makes the difference in an increasingly competitive business environment.

Organizations have apprehended the importance of data in their businesses and are looking deeper into data to gain a competitive advantage, implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence to achieve new business objectives and to move ahead of competitors in the industry.

A data asset is every piece of data that organizations use to generate revenues, they are currently among its the most valuable assets, and organizations must invest seriously on managing these assets.

Managing an organization’s data assets improves their decisions, their customers experience and loyalty, it impacts offer and innovation, impacts operation efficiency, it impacts processes, minimizing inefficiencies and reducing costs, it impacts risk and compliance, and may generate new revenue streams.

Organizations that manage their data as a true corporate asset rely on their data assets to develop new products, improve current products, and create better ways of providing value to their customers, employees, and stakeholders.

Not getting into the details of how critical a strong data foundation, grounded on sound data governance and data quality programs, there are three points that are important for organizations can manage their data assets successfully:

Data Strategy

A data strategy will act as a guide and aggregator to manage the data asset, and because data related business needs and requirement exist and need to be addressed, a structured and comprehensive data strategy, grounded on strategical business objectives, designed, and implemented at executive level, will support the management of the data that is critical to the organizations success, will help to think of the future and trends and how to address them, on how to drive innovation and establish a data culture, on democratizing the organizations data, and on how to develop a sustainable competitive advantage given the volume, depth and accessibility of data.

Data Minimalism

As we watch organizations struggling to collect as much data as possible, we can also see the infrastructure, storage, processing, and analysis costs increasing at the same time as the quality of analysis and insights is decreasing.

It’s essential that all this data collection is consistently planned before it happens, creating strategies to make sure that that the data being collected is being used, making sure data is clean and well managed, maximizing the value of the information, but also the value of data as a strategic asset.

Data Asset ROI

It’s not about data, it’s about business.

The return of data assets measures the capability of an organization to generate value from its data.

The return is measured by how it impacts business performance, creating key performance indicators, measuring:

· How it impacts customer experience and loyalty.

· How it impacts offer and innovation.

· How it impacts operation efficiency.

· How it impacts processes, minimizing inefficiencies and reducing costs.

· How in impacts risk and compliance.