How to monetize data with the Agile business process- Valutrics

Companies that want to commercialize their data — or those that want to create a data-driven solution using data from another source — should use an Agile lifecycle process, Stratigos said.

Step 1. Conceptualizing and defining the product offering is the first step, and it involves identifying and segmenting the target market, sizing the market, identifying end user needs, assessing the competition, testing the concept, and defining the top-level architecture.

Identifying the target market is a particularly important foundational step, according to Stratigos. “Target markets are really the intersection of two things: the role that you’re serving and the industry or industries that you’re serving,” she said. So, the critical questions are which vertical or verticals will your data make the most sense for? And which business users are you aiming your data offering at? For instance, are you aiming at salespeople across all industries or CFOs in the telecom space? The former is a more scalable opportunity, while the latter represents a small niche.

“If you’re in the real estate space and you have an offering for assessors, you have a tiny market. … It’s not a bad play, but if you’re really thinking about it in terms of market opportunity, [it’s a] reality check on opportunity,” Stratigos said. “We talk to venture capitalists quite often and we use that to assess opportunities from an investment perspective. In many cases the opportunity is not as good as it seems because of the fundamentals of the market that’s being targeted.”

Skipping the step of determining your target is a big mistake, according to Stratigos. “A lot of times, [companies] go straight to development and think ‘Oh, in an Agile world, we can just assemble a team, get the data, do it in real time, go to market, pivot.’ In organizations [that process takes] resources. A better, faster time to success, we believe, is to slow down … for a week, a day, a few minutes, [and] really think through who you are targeting your offerings to.”

Step 2. After the offering is defined and the target market determined, the business process moves on to assessing feasibility and prototyping. At this stage, companies should identify and select content and technology architecture; negotiate whether they will build or buy the data and technology to be used in the offering; evaluate products that will be used to get the offering to market; define user interactions; create the look and feel; develop test and launch plans; and review the prototype with users. Questions to ask at this stage, said Stratigos, are, “Do you buy data? Do you trade data? Is it going to be an analytics-driven solution?”

Step 3. The next step in the process is deployment and tactical marketing, wherein the product is actually produced, pricing is finalized, collateral is developed, sell-through channels are established, and sales performance versus competitors is assessed.

Step 4. The final step in this Agile business process is to measure performance: analyze web stats, assess profitability, measure ROI and customer loyalty, benchmark performance, and decide whether to revise or discontinue the offering.