Data As A New Currency

Habib Mahakian
Vice President Gulf,
Dell EMC

Oil has significantly influenced the development of many Middle Eastern countries, with cities springing up in the desert seemingly from nowhere. But this rapid growth has also seen the region embrace technology. As Dell EMC we revel in focusing on innovation in IT and equipping the Middle East with the tools to overcome the limitations of oil being a natural resource. Thanks to this digital transformation, we now have a new valuable asset that can potentially be traded as a currency: Data.


Data Is Essentially Useless Unless It Is Creating Value.
 

 “[oil] is valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down and analyzed for it to have value.” – Michael Palmer

 Although data is being produced every second of every day, it is generally considered worthless except for the exact moment in time at which it was created. In order to make data valuable we need to use analytics to find something actionable or identify decisions that can be optimized. But data and analytics go beyond knowing your revenue, profits and costs, real value lies in micro data, not macro-data; without it, we would not see progress.

If You Can Measure It, You Can Improve It.

By using data effectively in an organization, companies have the opportunity to understand more about their customers and products, thus providing greater opportunity to up-sell, cross-sell and improve customer retention rates. Additionally companies can use this data to innovate and create new products and services that will fulfill customer demand, which can ultimately give them a competitive edge.

Mining data to extract value

Big companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft use data to train computers to recognize objects in photos and understand human language. Although these companies have open sourced their artificial intelligence, they have not made the necessary data publicly accessible.  And without these humungous quantities of data, artificially intelligent systems could not be possible. In fact, the enormous value of data is highlighted in this very example, but is further substantiated in the statistics that state only 20% of the world’s information is stored on the internet, with the remaining data being privately stored within companies and organizations. Realizing this privately stored data is an asset can open new channels of income, with data even being used as a commodity to trade.

The Multiplier Effect

The injection of extra income into a business leads to more spending, which creates more income, and so on and so on, thus producing an economic concept called the ‘Multiplier Effect’. If we go a step further and transfer this notion to data, we can get a similar result when data is used simultaneously across multiple-use cases, which thereby increases its value to an organization.

To put this simply, corporations will have the opportunity to utilize their data to improve products, services and customer relations, but they could also trade their data to non-competitor businesses in exchange for tangible goods and services. These business will subsequently use this data to innovate further, and then trade the new data for even higher value goods, etc.

Data is fast becoming the most valuable currency in this new data economy. It is critical to making any business more successful, and it has changed the game as we knew it. By considering data as a new currency and leveraging the Multiplier Effect, companies can add value and income to their business, and even evolve traditional payment systems. By incorporating Dell EMC’s big data solutions, corporations will not just change with the game, but win it!

Big Data provides a wealth of opportunity and potential, but for the time being it remains an immensely untapped, valuble asset. But if like oil, we can help realize its fundamental value and learn to extract it and use it, we can all reap it’s greatest rewards.

Click here to  find out more information on Dell EMC’s data solutions.

About the Author: Dell Technologies