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Data: It’s not Gold or Oil, but its Value can be Huge. Businesses Weigh the Benefits of Build versus Buy
Machine learning, Big Data, and analytics. The potential of these technologies is undeniably huge. When applied correctly.
To achieve good results with any of these new generation data-based tools, you need data, and lots of it. Data is the new gold, the new oil, the key to competitive advantage for many industries.
But what do you do if you don’t have it? You’re a startup, a small company, or a company that historically hasn’t had the infrastructure in place to track and collect data, or you just feel that the data you do have is too limited. What do you do?
Well, you can build the infrastructure and then open the pipes to fill your data storage, but that’s easier said than done, and good data sets are ones that provide sufficient history that allows trends to be uncovered, so after pushing the button and turning it on, you’ll need to wait. Setting up infrastructure takes both time and money, not to mention patience.
While building the data collection infrastructure is one path to generate a data set, an alternative path to leapfrog a lack of data is to buy existing data sets or to augment your limited private data set with a public data set. Some companies, for example, specialize in the sale of data, aggregators like Lotame, Gravy Analtyics or Foursquare. Enterprise data can be purchased from places like Hoovers, DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo and Lead 411. To name just a few. Prices range from free to expensive and the price may not always correlate with value. Buyer beware. Caveat emptor.
Many companies are now choosing a middle ground, sending scouts down the path of infrastructure build-out and another set of scouts to scour the availability of suitable third-part data sets, resulting in a blend of in-house data with data purchased from external sources. Whatever you end up doing, choosing the right path will be hard and will differ for every company.
