How to get richer using open data

In the era of technological development and productive efficiency, two walls still stand in the way of anyone doing business and wanting to maximise profit: the time it takes to manage information and the cost of gathering it.

Whoever claims that instinct is enough in business is mistaken: winning investments call for the right information at the right moment. But what can you do when retrieving the data you need — perhaps by relying on third-party companies — becomes extremely expensive? And what can you do when sifting through and analysing gigantic databases takes days, while the decision to be made is of the utmost urgency?

Good news: the solutions exist, and they may be simpler than one expects. The most recent developments in data-management technologies have now made the enrichment of the information a company holds infinitely more efficient, promising large profit margins to the companies that seize the scale of these changes in time.

The secret? Start exploiting smart data — with the right tools.

Smart data: what they are

By definition, smart data is “data with semantics attached”. What does that mean?

Let us start with some numbers. According to International Data Corporation’s forecasts for the growth of data worldwide over the period 2010-2020 — which is now closing — the quantity of digital data was set to increase from forty to fifty times, up to a value of roughly 40 zettabytes (1 ZB = 10 to the 21st bytes). For every single inhabitant of the earth, that is equivalent to a mass of data of about three million books.

Managers encounter this every day: the quantity, the quality and above all the variety of the information a company can gather are vast. Very often, moreover — and this is less well known — the information is available to everyone on the web, in the form of open data: that is, data that is free and freely accessible at any moment. The problem? The problem remains finding it, choosing it and ordering it. In other words: making it readable — within reasonable time and cost.

This is where smart data comes in: intelligent information that knows how to position itself in the right place, with the right weight, in searches, reports and corporate databases. Data alone, though, is not enough. The right tools are needed. Let us look at an example.

Figure: analytics over business data.

How they are useful to companies: a concrete example

Let us take a type of data that is fundamental for every company, consulted daily: the master data of its contacts (customers, suppliers, agents…).

Imagine now an insurance company that needs the list of pharmacies in Italy, enriched with geographic coordinates so that it can be cross-referenced with socio-demographic, income and disease-incidence data. Its goal is to identify high-potential pharmacies in order to plan its commercial action. For many small and medium-sized enterprises this approach to marketing is still pure utopia: until recently it would have required considerably high time and cost.

Today, however, that company could decide to use a data-management tool. Here the ideal starting point is SDaaS, LinkedData.Center’s smart data platform. The enrichment itself is carried out by the CRM+ agent, which searches web 3.0 for the public information concerning the master data of contacts (email, website, social pages, telephone, geolocation), flags any differences from the data already held and enriches the master data while keeping track of the provenance of the data and of the usage licences.

It would discover here that the data of all pharmacies in Italy is published on the internet by the Ministry of Health, constantly updated and free to use. It could also use OpenStreetMap data for geographic coordinates and Istat data for socio-demographic and income information and for disease incidence. These are all open data, published openly on the web, and therefore usable by companies and people freely, including for commercial purposes.

CRM+ is a telling example of the intelligent use of smart data: it gathers and integrates all this information on the company’s behalf and, in a matter of moments, enriches thousands of master-data records, removing long manual searches or the need to buy this data from a specialised agency at often high cost. More than that: CRM+ ensures full control over the provenance of information that is vital to the business.

You can reorder the information you hold and look for new information

Using tools such as SDaaS allows marketing — indeed, the whole management layer of a company — to be brought to a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness. Several companies in Italy have already adopted this solution and are obtaining excellent results.

The most innovative companies have already moved. What is your company waiting for?