The Five Most Valued Attributes in an Entrepreneur’s Tool Belt

Technology today has fundamentally transformed how we live, work, play and care for each other, creating a new community of digital citizens living in an always-on, connected world. Everyone and everything in the Information Generation is perpetually generating data and contributing to a vast and growing information ecosystem of immense economic value.

Thomas Edison, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time once said, “There’s a way to do it better find it.” The sheer magnitude of information being generated by new technologies is a nirvana for innovators and entrepreneurs that choose to prioritize their greatest and often hidden asset: data. Many entrepreneurs and small business owners, shudder at the thought of the enormous amounts of data available to them but it doesnt have to be so daunting. Analyzing small batches of data will quickly lead to big opportunities.

Before starting, entrepreneurs must ask themselves two data-related questions that are incredibly critical to answer and will set apart the winners: what data do I have, and what is this data worth? Those that invest in resources people, process and technology to extrapolate meaningful value from data will find themselves in a tremendously advantageous position as the world continues racing toward a digital era.

Building this new style of business involves:

• The recruitment of data-savvy employees placed in data-centric organizations.
• The creation of formal business processes that explicitly focus on the economic value of data: buying, selling, analyzing, monetizing, trading, etc.
• Leveraging new IT software, hardware, and tools that support these new business processes.

Consumers and buyers living in todays connected world demand companies always be one step ahead in a world that moves at the speed of light. Understanding the value of your business data is what enables organizations to meet those expectations, and they will do so by executing on a new set of business attributes that successful companies of the future must master.

Predictively Spotting New Opportunities

Data will be a chief revenue driver for businesses. Data-savvy scientists, data engineers and data project managers reporting to Chief Data Officers are a few of the new roles in data-centric organizations. These are the people tasked with uncovering new business uses for data, whether its using user generated data to improve product design or licensing customer data to third parties to create new revenue streams. They experiment and run analytics and visualization models on data to extract value and predictively spot new opportunities for the business.

Innovate in an Agile Way

Startups and newer businesses have to rapidly create and continually update their consumer-facing user experiences to remain relevant. When a breakthrough idea occurs and new revenue is an app update away, businesses need to understand the new data flowing in from the consumer side and learn to use this new data to their advantage, and do so quickly. Businesses must have first-rate application development frameworks in place to get a new app up in hours, not days, and the IT tools and infrastructure on the backend to scale immediately.

Demonstrate Transparency and Trust

Clients and consumers today value transparency now more than ever. As new structured and unstructured data flows in, businesses need to protect it and provide only the appropriate people with access to it. For new and small businesses, transparency and trust is especially important as they will be held to the same data protection standards as large enterprises that have more resources. New positions such as Chief Data Governance Officers are becoming much more common to manage processes around the fair and ethical use of consumer data inside a company so that only the right people can get access to the right data.

Deliver a Unique, Personalized Experience

Every business wants to deliver a unique and personalized experience. But its likely the data gathered by your business will never deliver all the details needed to be known about your target customer. Enter the data broker. Entrepreneurs in the near future will need to work with these data brokers to gain unique insights into their customers insights only those that specialize in the buying, selling and trading of data would know. Organizations need employees to find new sources of data about their consumers in order to provide more personalization than competitors. They will be responsible for managing relationships with data brokers and being experts on both the private and open data sets. Data buying, selling, trading is a new business process that must be mastered.

Always on, Operating in Real Time

Downtime is no longer an option. Seconds count and slow speeds kill. To meet consumer expectations, data now must be shifted closer to the consumer in memory but maintain the 24/7 availability offered by traditional hardware. This involves the creation of two-tier IT infrastructures that can combine in-memory analytics with historical queries for the uninterrupted access that consumers expect with strong disaster recovery capabilities. For those just starting their business, its critical to set these IT systems in place from the beginning to not fall behind.

The ability for todays entrepreneurs and executives to recognize that data is the most valuable resource within a company is paramount as it can give the tools needed to be truly successful, provided a business is structured properly from within. Entrepreneurs starting and growing a business have the unique opportunity to build an organization that embraces this idea from the ground floor, which positions them to be leaps ahead of the competition. Starting small will lead to bigger opportunities down the road.