In the next installment of the Embedded Analytics Series from global data metrics leader Tableau, we dive into a roundtable on Data Monetisation with a brilliant panel of domain experts and thought leaders. Led by Senior Manager of Solution Engineering at Tableau, Mrunal Shridhar, the panel embarks on an in-depth discussion on the importance of data monetisation, why it should matter to product leaders and the ways in which Tableau can help on the journey to monetising your data.
If you missed the first webinar in the Embedded Analytics Series, take a moment to read through Turning Data Into Products with Experian, right here on Products That Count. Next in the series, industry giant Carrefour on Build vs. Buy provides insight on the values they find in embedded data analytics. Finally, we’ll draw the series to a close with Accelerating Insights with Grindrod, a conversation on how embedded analytics bolsters data-driven decision-making by allowing users to access reports and visual displays directly within an application user interface.
Now, let’s learn how product leaders can monetise their data.
Opportunities within Data Monetisation
Within the world of product, the use of data metrics by product leaders is growing at an astronomical rate. With that growth comes immense opportunities, says Mrunal Shripar, and businesses need to recognize how and when to leverage this expanding data knowledge into larger economic returns.
“Big or small, businesses around the world have data assets. These are assets that we’ve been building and investing in for most of an organisation’s life. With more investment and data pouring into these data assets, there is an opportunity to turn data assets into data treasures; treasures that hold immense potential to build new offers, products and services, that can help these treasures into great monetisation opportunities. Monetisation means generating measurable economic benefits from available data sources through analytics.”
With that exciting statement to set the tone, Mrunal quickly breaks down go-to-market strategies for data monetisation, be it external or internal. For businesses, he says “data as a product and insight as a service are often delivered directly to your customers and can include not just raw data, but also refined data, analysis results, predictions, forecasts, and even consulting.”
With the opportunities clearly laid out, the first step for product leaders is to evaluate and choose the right analytics and BI platform that will help companies expand their “data treasures”. Concluding his intro, Mrunal brings in Alex Eskinasy, Principal Solutions Engineer at Tableau, to provide viewers with a demonstration of how Tableau’s embedded data analytics platform can aid in unlocking that data potential.
Demonstrating monetisation with Embedded Analytics
Pulling from his extensive experience as Principal Solutions Engineer, Alex starts off his demonstration by laying out the practicalities of Embedded Analytics.
“Embedded analytics is defined as data and analytics integrated seamlessly within the content or service being delivered to the end-user. That could be via a website, a service like Salesforce, or even a mobile app.”
Data touches all members of a company with stakeholders present in every team. After a quick visual rundown of the Tableau platform, Alex dives deep to elaborate on various monetisation use cases that demonstrate the flexibility, ease of use, and tight integrations available to any user, be they customer, developer, or product leader.
“Customers love to monetise the idea of providing self-service analytics within their software. With a simple button, they have a self service experience in the browser and they can do their own pieces of analysis. When I use a selector, it employs a sophisticated, statistical engine behind the scenes that does statistical analysis and tells me why there is an outlier, giving me a few recommendations and ideas of why we have different extreme values. This is a pitch you can monetise.”
How ICIS uses data analytics
When a company approaches a core business evolution, it oftentimes occurs at the demand of the customers. Manca Vitorino, Director of Data Operations at ICIS, a leading provider of chemical and energy data analytics, starts off the Q&A portion of the webinar with insights regarding the ways data helps their customers overcome challenges in the energy space.
“Our customers no longer just trade with their neighbors; they’re looking for customers further afield. With the increase of risks like natural disasters, financial crises, and now COVID, our customers need data to help them make decisions to optimise profits, mitigate those risks, and manage production.”
Continuing that line of inquiry, Manca expresses the need for excellent tools that increase customer knowledge and help optimise resources.
“The daily commodity price is no longer really enough. They need tools that help them calculate arbitrage opportunities, tools that predict prices in a month or a year, and so on. Our ICIS vision states that we shape the world by connecting markets to optimise resources. This means that we also recognise that the world’s resources are finite. We need to help our customers make the most of them and support their sustainability efforts.”
Like any other business adjustment, the journey into data monetisation doesn’t occur overnight. With that in mind, Manca gives a peek into the stages ICIS touched as they look for ways to solve customer problems through the lens of data, and how Tableau played a pivotal role in that growth.
“Data is really only relevant in the framework of the problem that it can help solve. If the problem is that a customer needs to calculate which market provides them with the highest margin, then you need process, shipping costs, cost of production, and so on. Those individual data components solve that specific problem and therefore, you have a way to monetise it.”
“We grew from a publishing business and at that point data used to be in the domain of technologists. In order for me, as a journalist, to find the story behind the changing market conditions, I really needed to access and visualise data in a tool that didn’t require me to code.
Tableau really enabled that core business function, which at the time was editorial, to access, understand and gather insights into data.”
Users of Embedded Data Analytics
In the final portions of the Q&A the mic is handed to the CTO of The Information Lab, Craig Bloodworth, to dig a bit deeper into the different levels Tableau provides to users and its value to data monetisation projects from day one.
“By having Tableau in your data monetisation project, you have a platform that can work with the data to start developing the monetisation project from day one, while also building the portal or application that’s going to your clients.”
“At a basic level, users are able to see the key dashboard and they can explore and filter down. At the second level, there are more in-depth dashboards that make use of web edit and gain custom insights. Thirdly, at the highest price point, they’re able to connect directly with the Tableau server, meaning they can take their own internal dashboards and connect with benchmarking data directly as a Tableau data source.”
With data at the forefront of product, teams and their leaders need to constantly look for new value opportunities for the company. Data monetisation is simply one of the ways product leaders can expand verticals with new offerings to customers. Next up in the Embedded Analytics Series, Carrefour tackles the classic Build vs Buy scenario with the help of data analytics.