Monetizing Your Data

CHAPTER 1Introduction

The explosion of information is accelerating. This can be seen in our everyday use of emails, online searches, text messages, blog posts, and postings on Facebook and YouTube. The amount of data being created and captured is staggering. It is flooding corporate walls and is only getting worse as the next big explosion is already upon us, the Internet of Things, when our machines talk to each other. At this point, the rate of information growth may go exponential. In his article for Industry Tap, David Russell Schilling explained the theory behind futurist Buckminster Fuller's “Knowledge Doubling Curve.”

…until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today…human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the buildout of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.

According to Gartner, as many as 25 billion things will be connected by 2020. As we try to make sense of this information, of what Tom Davenport calls the “analytics of things,” we will need methods and tools to assimilate and distill the information into actionable insights that drive revenue. Having these troves of information is of little value if they are not utilized to give our companies a competitive edge. How are companies approaching the problem of monetizing this information today?

One approach that gets inconsistent results, for instance, is simple ...