How much is data worth? It seems like a silly question, until you recognize a really intriguing factoid: If you look at the financial valuations of companies that were built on data, like Facebook or Uber or Twitter, there’s a gap between the actual market valuation and their market valuation. That’s their goodwill gap, and that gap is what, as Capgemini vice-president Jeff Hunter puts it, “screams to the value of data.”
Just to illustrate – and I’m certainly not the first one to make this comparison – Facebook is now worth about $200 billion. United Airlines, a company that actually owns things like airplanes and has licenses to lucrative things like airport facilities and transoceanic routes between the U.S. and Asia, among other places, is worth $34 billion. Just sayin’.
To prove the point – and indeed, to show that other companies can unleash their inner Facebook – Capgemini recently completed a report entitled Big & Fast Data: The Rise of the Insight-Driven Business, an adjunct to the report I wrote about earlier this year.
Hunter talked about some really eye-opening takeaways to this most-recent report, compiled from a survey incorporating results from more than 1,000 C-suite and senior decision makers.
Interesting takeaway No. 1: 61% of respondents “acknowledge that big data is now a driver of revenues in its own right and is becoming as valuable to their businesses as their existing products and services.”
This result is really exciting. It’s like the moment when companies realize they’re sitting on patents that they don’t really need, but actually have value to someone else. Sometimes it’s hard to make that connection, but once you realize that something you possess has value already, without you having to do much to it, it’s like found money.
On the flip side – because I’m always looking for the flip side – there’s the question of whether we’re going to reach a point where people are going to get a little peeved about companies making money off of information that they’ve generated. Whose data is it anyway?
Hunter is of two minds on this. “It depends on how the data is being used, repurposed, or resold. Companies aren’t out to resell the data en masse. They want to drive toward derived results that better serve customers and themselves,” he says, noting that customers are probably less concerned about aggregated data. But he also acknowledges that there’s a real generational disconnect on the question of who owns data. “Your perception of data is based on your comfort level. My wife would see it as disconcerting, while my teenage daughter would see it as convenient.”
Interesting takeaway No. 2: 43% of respondents already have or are currently reorganizing in order to exploit new big data opportunities.
This begs the question, who’s becoming more powerful in this reorganization? Hunter doesn’t see IT or marketing or operations getting the upper hand. Instead, he sees companies creating strategic units focused around data, providing insights to specific departments or functions: human resources, marketing, logistics, and others.
“It’s a different kind of alignment,” says Hunter. “These teams are bringing people from marketing, finance, and accounting – groups that understand collecting and analyzing data – and provide insight to experts within the unit.” It’s a strong combination, he says, of using data and intuition. The benefit comes from using them together, rather than relying solely on the latter. The result is an effort that’s “very operationally focused, [having] re-engineered the forecasting process to be as quantitative as possible,” says Hunter. And in the process, transforming forecasting from a process that used to take days and weeks and reduces it down to minutes.
Interesting takeaway No. 3: 54% of respondents say their big data investments over the next three years will outstrip past investment.
With the kind of potential payoffs and efficiencies respondents are talking about, you’d be silly not to.
