Data monetization is becoming a big thing in enterprise IT.
It is not a secret that a lot of companies are now using big data to help them get insights into everything, their operations, their competition and their customers. Data monetization allows them to do more with their data instead of just storing it after they are done with it. Being able to gather insights about your company to help you in decision-making is in itself a big return on your big data investments, but your data might be of help to other companies as well and they will be willing to pay for it.
The data that you collect about your customers would be valuable to other companies as well. So much so that they are willing to pay for it. For example, a financial institution has information on their customers that would be valuable to any bank so that they can market more effectively to their own customers, or allow them to know which value added services and products to offer.
But data monetization is not instantly done. You cannot just open up your data and tell other companies to pay in order to access it. What do you need to do in order to monetize your data?
Here are the five steps:
- Assess and prepare. Take a look at what types of data you have and figure out which ones are valuable to external parties. You will also need to be able to extract all the externally valuable data that you have.
- Review your own policies. You would also need to review your own company policies, procedures and guidelines to see what types of data you could make available for monetization. This will also give you a good idea whether or not you would be doing your company’s reputation any damage from sharing the data. The best way to go about this is to make sure that you are transparent in telling your customers that you will be sharing their data.
- Give something of value to your customers in exchange for their data. Be sure to get authorization from your customers before you share their data. Also assure them that their privacy will be protected. These steps will help you convince customers to give you their information.
- Know the rules. Different types of data fall under different types of laws, regulations and other legal issues. You should know all the rules in order to be sure that what you are sharing is all above board.
- Initiate and foster partner relationships. This is to ensure that data integrity is upheld every step of the way. This also helps you ascertain that the data you monetized will not be used in any manner that is damaging to your company.
Data monetization allows you to extend the use of the data you already have from just being used for internal purposes or not being used while being stored to something that you can earn money from. You just need to be more creative and exercise a lot of care to realize a return on investment that you never thought was possible
Call Four Cornerstone today and see how you can initiate data monetization initiatives at your own organization.
