Here is an excerpt from an article by Barbara H. Wixom, Ina M. Sebastian, Robert W. Gregory, and Gabriele Piccol for the MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illuastration Credit: Jon Krause/theispot.com
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Your data assets are key to developing new value for your customers and giving you clout in digital ecosystems.
Most organizations have learned how to share data tactically. They’ve put technical infrastructure and processes in place so that they can easily transfer data when necessary to comply with regulations, execute transactions, or provide a service. But far fewer companies have begun to explore the opportunities created by a more strategic approach to data sharing.
In today’s digital economy, business leaders need a data-sharing strategy to pursue novel digital solutions — and move in new business directions. Strategic data-sharing practices allow an organization to share data quickly and with control for specific opportunities with specific partners, and to share it repeatedly, with an emphasis on value creation. As strategic data-sharing practices mature over time, purposeful, fast, and creative data sharing becomes the basis for business model innovation and the resulting payoffs.
Energy management and industrial automation company Schneider Electric is a case in point. It uses its internet of things platform to share data with its business customers in order to discover and deliver energy management solutions.1 In 2016, company leaders saw IoT as a significant opportunity to develop new products and services based on the monitoring and analysis of connected assets. Along with the data-sharing platform, they developed a tool to collect both structured and unstructured data about the company’s products in use at a customer site, drawing on sensor data and maintenance logs. Using a dynamic risk monitoring algorithm, the tool detects operating risks and their sources, and it allows facility managers who purchase the product to manage the performance of assets themselves or use a Schneider Electric service center.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Barbara H. Wixom is principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). Ina M. Sebastian is a research scientist at MIT CISR. Robert W. Gregory is an associate professor of business technology at Miami Herbert Business School. Gabriele Piccoli is a professor and the Edward G. Schlieder Endowed Chair of Information Sciences at Louisiana State University’s E.J. Ourso College of Business, and associate professor of information systems at the University of Pavia.
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