How to Extract the Maximum Value from Your Information Assets

In the late 1800s, John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, H.L. Hunt, and many others started making vast personal fortunes in oil.  Today, it’s often said that with modern digital technologies “data is the new oil.” Indeed, eight of the ten richest people in the world are not oil magnates, they are founders and owners of information purveying conglomerates like Google, Facebook, Twitter (X), Amazon, and Oracle, according to Forbes. 

Just as oil has little value in its raw state, data only becomes valuable when a company finds it, extracts it, and refines it into something of value. Their motivations could be two-fold: ward off competing digital disruptors – like fintechs and insurtechs – or to leverage their data as the raw material for next-generation, information-rich products and services of their own as part of their digital transformation innovation strategy.

When harnessed, data has two intrinsic forms of value: for internal use and for external marketability.  Both are critical to a digital transformation effort:

• Internal use: this is data that helps your company make smarter, faster, more profitable strategic decisions. It is operational in nature and serves as the “secret sauce” that helps companies outsmart and outpace their competition. 

• External marketability: this is data you use to create information-based products and services that can be marketed to customers and prospects. It could be new direct-to-end-consumer products, or API-based features and functions that complement solutions from third-party technology partners. 

A Platform for Success

In the competitive digital economy, a gold rush mentality is driving companies to invest trillions of dollars into digital transformation. The overarching goal of digital transformation is unifying all information across the enterprise, using digital technologies to democratize it regardless of its source or the role of domain experts using it, and rallying everyone in the organization to use the resulting information assets to build agile, transformation-rich, customer-centric solutions.  Such innovation will accelerate the development of offerings that result in higher levels of short-term customer satisfaction and long-term retention, which in turn fuels longer customer lifecycles and higher lifetime value (share of wallet).

From the outset, this requires a massive data integration effort. For years, the most common approaches to data integration have been digital technologies like ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) and ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform). While these were once new technologies and effective to a point, they don’t solve the problem of “siloed” data or allow for the persistent instantaneous transfer and analysis of data in a manner needed to enable real-time decisions and actions. 

Because of the time, costs, and technological shortcomings of previous-generation approaches, more and more companies are turning to agile enterprise decisioning platforms to accelerate the attainment of their digital transformation goals by holistically orchestrating their enterprise information. In a recent study by IDG, it was reported that the top priority cited by IT leaders responsible for new technologies was “Evaluating optimal IT Platforms,” and more than 65% are already executing towards it as part of digital transformation strategy. .

Why are enterprise decisioning platforms a vastly superior alternative to old-school ETL and ELT approaches in transformation? For starters, solutions like FICO Platform enable the corporate cloud-wide sharing of information in real-time. This eliminates challenges caused by siloed systems, to allow companies to:

• Share, democratize, and mobilize all information assets across the company. This is essential to digital transformation because it allows businesses to use automation to unify all of their data from every source, they can connect the dots and fill in the gaps between siloed departmental applications. This enables business model and business process changes that ensure better corporate, not just departmental, decisions at every point of the customer lifecycle. The persistent application of AI, machine learning, and algorithmic analytics applied in real time iteratively improves the quality of data, and thus decisions, over time.  

• Codify business users’ domain expertise into ubiquitous, persistently applied automated intelligence. By empowering and encouraging business users to create and manage information strategies, rules, and analytics that drive decisions and actions, companies combine the “book smarts” of the technology organization with the “street smarts” of business users. This enables companies to respond swiftly to shifts in business scenarios and foster a customer-driven mindset that ensures more prosperous outcomes, the ultimate goal of digital transformation

• Leverage and re-use connected decision assets to improve decision automation across the enterprise and across the customer lifecycle. This is a transformational capability that gives companies the ability to create customized, targeted decisioning strategies that are consistent, transparent, explainable and expandable as needed over time. 

• Simulate and optimize strategies before they are put into production. This provides highly accurate predictions about programs’ prospects for success, giving companies the highest possible degree of certainty that programs will perform as desired when launched. By iteratively simulating, fine-tuning, and perfecting strategies prior to launch, companies ensure optimal, predictable results, to maximize success rate and ROI.

• Consistently deliver automated, seamless, hyper-personalized customer experiences. This enables companies to offer customers consistent, tailored experiences that are reached by, and infused with, customer intelligence. Armed with AI-validated personalized customer strategies, companies can more accurately predict and effectively serve their clients’ immediate and future needs, paving the way for cross-selling and up-selling. This is the key to consistently delivering a compelling customer experience, which raises short-term customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as long-term customer retention and share-of-wallet, the payoff for your digital transformation investment.