Data at Work

The world of data and its many applications. This blog will help you learn how visionary companies are monetizing their data assets and utilizing external data to enhance business operations.

Go-To-Market Guidebook #2: Built for Buyers

Once earmarked for commercialization, a data product must be structured correctly in order to be credible and sellable to promote potential data sales

In order to appropriately construct a product, it is important for organizations to address the following four considerations.

Credibility:

Personally Identifiable Information Example 1 Photo credit: / Foter / CC BY

Data products must adhere to international laws & regulations and the information security policies of the organization itself. There are two main steps in structuring the data product to ensure that this takes place:

  1. All personal information must be removed
  2. Ensure that the data product is not exposing company/organizational secrets

Personal information removal:

Personally Identifiable Information Example 2 Photo credit: / Foter / CC BY

Selling identities is illegal just about everywhere in the world. Any data products for sale must be devoid of personally identifiable information (PII).  Vendors can still aggregate their user data into audience segments, sentiment indices and generic profiles, such as with digital advertising; however, all individual identity data must be removed.

For more information on how to structure a data product, check out our whitepaper, "The Practical Guide to Selecting and Structuring Data Products."

Sensitive Company Information:

Confidential information leakage. Photo credit: / Foter / CC BY

Data Vendors should be diligent to ensure that the data products they create are not exposing company/organizational secrets that could erode competitive edge over their rivals. Simply put, data that could be detrimental to an organization’s positioning or endanger public safety shouldn’t be sold. For a deeper discussion of this topic, please download the whitepaper “The Practical Guide to Selecting and Structuring Data Products” linked above.

Commercial Appeal: 

People queueing. Photo credit: / Foter / CC BY-SA

Once the data has been structured so as to be compliant, the next step is to make it commercially appealing. In order to achieve this, the organization must decide on the overall characteristics of the commercial data.

The main considerations here are:

  • Information included to address previously identified use cases
  • Timing (real-time vs historical update)
  • Delivery (push vs. pull)
  • Format (JSON, XML, PDF, CSV, etc.)

Organizations should choose the characteristics that will yield the highest overall appeal to the market of data buyers, and exceed costs incurred to produce it. Once all these considerations have been solidified, then, voila! A data product is born!

For more information on the five-step process for bringing a data product to market, click the button below:

Download "The Visionary Leader's Guide to Data Monetization"

Missed the first part of the series? See "Go-To-Market Guidebook #1: What you got?" to help your organization understand how to sell data.