It is no exaggeration that data is the new form of currency today; it’s as much an asset as oil and gold are in today’s economy. It was only in the past decade that many companies realised the potential of right data as invaluable asset to organisation’s growth and performance.  And ever since that, organizations have been formulating ways to fuel their Business growth through data. Before we move on further, let’s understand how valuable data is for any business.

In any organisation, data can be in several forms like customer data, product data, employee’s data, etc. Without having the right data of the employees, customers or products, the organization would always end up devastated and it is understood by now that correct data is the key factor to run the business effectively.  There is hardly any business today which doesn’t depend on data-driven decisions. CEO’s these days are relying more on right data for business decisions than ever before, like which product is more successful in the market, the demand that exists for a product area wise, the competitive pricing, etc. The required data can be accumulated by the organizations through multiple sources including both internal, external and even Social Media. Internal data is the data generated through internal systems and own operations like from a bank, adding new customers, customer’s transactions with bank through multiple channels (ATM, On-line payments, purchases, etc.) Whereas, external can be procured from gold exchange rates and foreign exchange rates from RBI. To a major contribution, these days, the social media data is widely being used for marketing and acquiring customer feedback on products. Harnessing the data from all avenues and using it intelligently is vital to business’ success

Walking an extra mile, few companies have even monetized on data and grew in wealth, Healthcare IQ, Owens & Minor, state street Global Corporation, Ad Juggler, ComScore, Verisk Analytics, Verisk Health, LexisNexis, to name a few. These organisations buy raw data that includes web analytics of Online products sale information, online search records for each brand, etc., and reprocess the data to organized format and sell it for value to research analysts, organisations that are in the lookout for competitor intelligence data to reposition their products in markets.

Factors fuelling the growth of data and business:

Fundamental changes in the market and customer behaviour have created a significant impact on data explosion. Some of the key drivers of change are:

Customer Preference: Customers today have several means of interacting with business, let’ say, for example, a bank provides multiple channels like ATM withdrawals, Online banking, Mobile banking, card payments, On-premise banking, etc. about which the organizations must maintain a track record of concerning their business operations. Eventually, these multiple channels have contributed to increased data management.

Social media: Data is flooding on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., which are social interaction forums between individuals. Companies, on other hands, rely extensively on the social media to socialize their products, and the data posted in terabytes/ petabytes is in turn used by many organisations for data mining too. This again is contributing to the huge data explosion.

Regulations: Companies are required to maintain data in proper format for the stipulated time as required by regulatory requirements. When we talk about anti-money laundry, each organization dealing with finance is required to maintain clear customer records, credentials to share with regulatory authorities over an extended period of 10 to 15 years.

Digital world: As we move towards the paperless digital world, we keep adding more digital data, like E-books, ERP applications, to automate many tasks to avoid paperwork. The innovations as such are generating much digital data growth as well.

The next generation will be more data-intensive with an Internet of things and data science at the forefront to drive the business and customer priorities.

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