Last month, our featured research focused on building the foundation of an insights-driven business. This month, it’s time to start renovating, quickly. While every house needs a strong foundation, you also need to know when to start renovating to future-proof its value. Three ways to future-proof your insights capabilities? Commercialize data, adopt a cloud-enabled data platform, and tap into the B2B insights opportunity.

Bring Your Data To Market — It’s Worth It

Data is without a doubt valuable, but when stored in vaults and locked down, it is not. Theoretical models of data’s value are themselves worthless. Only when data is applied to a specific use case can CIOs determine its value: Data plus use equals value. The revenue generated or costs saved by using the data determines its value. Internal use cases don’t necessarily lead to valuation. However, taking data to market requires price setting. The pricing of data products forces valuation based on what buyers are willing to pay, and a variety of pricing models exist, from flat fee, per-record pricing, and try-and-buy options to tiered pricing with upsell. For example, Indigo, a smart parking operator, is working with OpenDataSoft to share its data worldwide, but it plans to develop premium offers that include more detailed data and historical trends. Siemens Mobility also has a tiered model that allows train operators to opt for either access to the data, access to the data insights, or a fully outsourced service with predictive maintenance based on the data insights.

Spin The Data-To-Insights Wheel Faster With Cloud HARK Platforms

Business insights pros face a perennial challenge: to turn the data-to-insights wheel faster. That “wheel” includes data acquisition, data security, data transformation, data governance, data exploration, analytics, and machine learning that is massively scalable, performant, and fault-tolerant. You can no longer rely on a batch-oriented storage, processing, and highly programmatic data platform. You need a cloud-enabled, highly interconnected analytical platform that can support a wide range of use cases and stakeholders. Check out our latest evaluation on cloud Hadoop/Spark (HARK) platforms.

B2B Analytics For Growth And Efficiency — You Can Have It All

B2B and B2B2C firms have made great strides in applying analytics to growth or prioritizing analytics resources on efficiency; firms that explore both paths with equal rigor, however, are very hard to come by. But as a B2B firm, you can have it all. You don’t have to make a tradeoff between growth or efficiency. Businesses can and must use analytics to invest in growth and manage for efficiency to achieve diverse goals and outcomes by leveraging four types of insights: customer and consumer; revenue growth; cost control and optimization; and operational. There is a lot of untapped potential for analytics adoption in B2B. Seize it.

Follow this monthly blog series to keep up with the latest business insights, data strategy, and analytics research and thought leadership.

Note: You will need a Forrester subscription to access research featured and linked in this post.

(Aldila Yunus, research associate, contributed to this blog post.)