Are Businesses Ready to Rake in the Moolah with DATA?

Author(s): Sreelatha S

Originally published on Towards AI.

Data as the New Economy U+007C Towards AI

Data has become the new economy of our time. But are enterprises and businesses ready to derive value from this new economy? What does it take to ride on this economy? To begin with, let us briefly see how we got to this point in time.

Data was limited in variety, volume, and veracity until the age of internet-connected devices. With the advent of smart devices such as phones, Fitbits, home appliances the amount of data that round trips the internet servers have grown enormously. Smartphones and a plethora of apps on them have made it significantly easier for businesses to establish proximity with their consumers, needless to say in this symbiotic relationship consumers end up sharing a lot of their preferences, patterns, and behaviours with the businesses.

Today we have stepped closer to opening up our homes and lives to the internet, by adopting personal virtual assistants, smart home appliances and other smart gadgets, it is only a matter of time and technology when we will have our minds and intellect on devices we can carry around with privacy being an obsolete notion. Well, that is a topic for another article!

Volumes of data that is assimilated, cleansed and analyzed is the real fuel driving the data economy.

Data brings with it issues of ownership, legalities regarding the permissible rights for use, challenges to guard against moral and ethical breach, the requirement to ensure privacy, prevent data theft and much more. Technology and business challenges are about data storage, compliance to regional and national laws while maintaining data, audit readiness, methods on data theft prevention, effective processes to cleanse and de-duplicate data, type of analytics recommended on the subject data, cost of maintaining the data, deciding on data retention period, and determining the usability or relevancy age for the data and many such more.

Granted there are problems in exploiting the data economy today, but with the passing time and advancements in technology, the consumption and use of this new fuel will become more fluid.

Compelling statistics revealed in this IDC study shows that by 2020 the percentage of useful data, which is the data that is considered as a right fit for analytics and for revealing useful insights that propel new or existing business opportunities, would grow from 22% in 2013 to 37% in 2020, while the actual total data volume would grow from 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 to a whopping 44 zettabytes by 2020.

IDC study also shows that both the mature and emerging markets will have a competitive play in leveraging this explosive data growth.

So by now, we understand how data got thus far and what the future beholds in terms of data growth and use. Now, let us circle back to the title of the article — Are businesses ready to make money with this data economy? What determines their readiness?

Having a data strategy is key.

Yes, every business needs a clear data strategy to underpin their philosophy related to data retention, data analytics, data insights, and data compliance. A business also would need to have consistency and regulation in determining and exposing the touch points for accepting or collecting data inputs and it would be of paramount importance to devise a way to measure the actual value to business that would result by leveraging insights derived from the datasets.

When strategy becomes key, we need a strategist. Many enterprises will start seeing the need for the following roles in their organizations. A CDO or chief data officer, who will be the executive responsible for strategising everything related to data. A data scientist who knows how to work with the datasets to derive useful statistics based outcomes. A data steward who will be responsible for ensuring the regulatory and compliance needs for maintaining and managing datasets. A data engineer and a data ops professional who will have the necessary skills to design and build platforms and solutions that can ingest, cleanse, store and make the data available for analytics. Investing in data specific roles and tools or platforms would be the key determining factor of readiness for enterprises or businesses.

Innovations and advancements in areas of Augmented or Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data Analytics are only propelling the data economy in the right direction. Embracing these technological advancements and finding or creating the fit for use in business use cases is becoming the new challenge and opportunity for LoB.

Strategise, invest, innovate — key to ride the data wave.

If you are looking for elaborate discussion on topics in the data economy, then the book titled Profiting from the Data Economy should be a good read.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI