Today, companies rely heavily on data, which they consider their most valuable resource. Most business leaders, however, cannot articulate the value of their company’s data. Data plays a critical role in product and service delivery in today’s globally connected and highly competitive markets, not only in terms of brand equity. 

Today, industries collect enormous amounts of data using SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software that sits idle. By mining this data using artificial intelligence, we can make better business decisions, find preventative maintenance opportunities, identify correlations and causality, and improve the business processes, thereby saving costs.

Data helps you improve processes.

Data is a valuable asset, and thriving industry captains understand its value and how it helps improve business processes. 

For example, commercial buildings consume over 35 percent of all energy. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) account for more than 30% of the energy use in most commercial buildings.

The challenge for commercial building owners and facility managers is to meet both financial and energy efficiency goals.

Thanks to the rapid development of IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, sensors, big data solutions, wireless and network solutions, and cloud computing, vast amounts of data have been collected, leading to a considerable amount of data analytics solutions replacing traditional HVAC digitization solutions. Using this data, HVAC systems can be optimized and controlled.

Appropriate data analytics for HVAC systems could reduce energy consumption and save owners thousands of dollars by acquiring unnecessary equipment or replacing outdated equipment.

Another example can be seen in Wastewater Management. For instance, water utilities receive data from SCADA systems, which include flow statistics, online monitoring, dissolved oxygen (DO) measurements, as well as from laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS). 

With the Internet Age, operators of water and wastewater treatment plants can gather disparate data into a single, meaningful pool of information that they can use to improve plant reliability and performance. We can now turn all that data into understandable, useful information by leveraging Big Data initiatives and data management tools, enabling us to make more informed decisions about plant operations.

How to value your data based on metrics

Your data’s value can be measured using a variety of metrics; the most common are:

Data type: Your business collects what kinds of data? Is your business capable of remarketing or anonymizing data if necessary?

Coverage: What is the extent of your data coverage for a particular market? Can you provide market-wide analysis with your data?

Recency: Is your Data up-to-date? Are you generating data hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or in batches? Data that is more recent will have more excellent value.

Resolution: What level of detail do you have in your data? It is not so important how many data points you have within your data and how detailed and relevant they are.

Accuracy: What is the accuracy and reliability of your data? To ensure accuracy, relevant data is validated.

Geography: Do you collect data in a single geographic region or around the world? The location of your data can affect its value.

Final Thought 

The potential value of leveraging existing data to create new processes, products, services, revenue models, or business models, as well as the potential costs incurred by a data breach or loss, should be considered by business leaders in evaluating the value of data.

Thus data as an enterprise asset can be managed, deployed, and valued to:

  • Assess the return on investment (ROI) of big data analytics, machine learning, and data management
  • Taking better decisions about monetizing data
  • Making new products, developing processes, and reducing costs by using data