Are slow data acquisition speeds eliminating your competitive advantage?

Time to market can affect your ability to compete.

In 2018, the global revenue for data sales was $19.2 billion. Eighty percent of data buyers expect to spend more in 2019. It's clear that the race is on for both buyers and sellers to capitalize on the promise of big data.

For companies acquiring data, the power to unlock the information contained within the data can help capture market share, increase revenue, and potentially open up new business opportunities.

For companies that distribute data, the revenue potential seems endless as the appetite for data quickly becomes reliance resulting in years of forecastable revenue.

However, from an execution standpoint, some barriers threaten the dreams on both sides of the data economy.

The key to leveraging data for strategic advantage is to acquire, analyze, and implement data before competitors do. As companies race to better understand who is in-market for a new car, suffering from allergies, or what ticker will be up this quarter, having in-the-moment data is critical to success.

How data is acquired is as important as what data is acquired

The data acquisition method has a direct effect on the usefulness of the data. The historical model requires a lot of manual labor from all parts of the organization, slowing the process and reducing the value.

The process to acquire data usually begins with the business development team sourcing the data. If they can locate data of interest, a data evaluation follows, which includes both legal and engineering resources to execute.

Next, data scientists perform the analysis. Keep in mind this is all to review data which may not even be of use. If the data is useful, there are still terms to agree on and ongoing data ingestion to manage.

In the race to discover and apply new insights, the complex nature of the data discovery and acquisition process is glossed over. From beginning to end, this process can easily last six months and cost thousands of dollars in employee time and processing fees.

Imagine the value of not only having access to useful data but having it months before competitors do.

If Ford knows someone is in-market for a new truck weeks before Chevy does, that is a tremendous advantage. An emphasis on operational efficiency benefits all parts of an organization, saving money, and magnifying the value of the data.

Home-grown data monetization solutions cost time and money

Data distributors also have a responsibility and an opportunity to benefit from improved efficiency when monetizing data. In an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem, data distributors are no longer able to dump the firehose of data on a prospective customer and expect them to do all the work.

When meeting the demands of data analysts, data must be delivered with a specific structure, in particular formats, and often filtered against other data sources. A supplier who cannot provide data in a timely fashion will lose out to those who can.

Data delayed is data decayed and therefore of less value to companies paying for it. Great value can be derived when applying technology and structure to an otherwise messy process.

Given the high stakes of the data economy, it is imperative buyers and sellers utilize available technology to speed up the monetization sales cycle from both sides of the equation.

It is easy to put a data monetization slide together to outline how data in will result in value out. However, little consideration is given to whether data is delivered by a rocket ship or carrier pigeon.

To fully recognize the value of data, buyers and sellers must work together to create an efficient transaction process.

If the current manual process isn't revamped, the inefficient nature of buying and selling data threatens to slow the industry's growth.

Technology to the rescue

Narrative has developed two platforms that address the specific needs of both data buyers and sellers. In offering a centralized resource by which to schedule transactions, it changes data transactions from many-to-many to a one-to-many effort. The result is an easier, transparent, and efficient process.

With a few clicks in the Narrative Acquire platform, buyers can utilize a set of tools to discover, test, and ultimately obtain specific data types from across various providers. Data is then deduplicated and delivered in the preferred format to the desired location. The platform also tracks transactions details such as data volume and pricing.

Similarly, suppliers can manage data sales via Narrative Distribute. Filters can be applied to the data, such as matches to specific IDs or locations, and set up to fulfill on an ongoing basis. Utilizing the Narrative platform reduces the reliance on the engineering team to prepare and send data, and gets data to market more quickly.

The goal here is to eliminate or reduce the manual and repetitive tasks and process which currently slow down data from being bought and sold. The result: you get to spend time producing excellent outcomes with the data, not figuring out how to best deliver or ingest it.

Narrative has a solution to move the data economy forward by allowing buyers and sellers to come together more efficiently and that is good for everyone.

Want to learn more about how Narrative can help you boost your speed to market and supercharge your data strategy? Schedule a call with our team.