Data valuation and commercialisation is a new and exciting field in data science. Precious little has been done in the past to value a business’s data asset, but that’s beginning to change with the big data revolution and an increased emphasis on data related assets to form part of a balance sheet. As part of the valuation process, the commercial aspects of the data are also required to be fully investigated, which often uncovers additional opportunities.

The first step in valuing data is to understand what data assets an organisation has, which involves doing a full audit. This is often one of the hardest steps depending on the complexity of the business. For example, large government departments often have legacy systems and fragmented data sets that don’t talk to each other, while other organisations might just have a customer list which is a single source of data, this is common with e-commerce sites.

Once the data has been audited the next step involves valuing the data. There are several approaches that we take when valuing data and the approach will vary according to each business. Common approaches include establishing an economic value, market value or cost value or use a combination of these valuation methodologies. For example, a bank’s valuation methodology might be based on the “cost value” which is the cost to replace the data if it was lost. An online e-commerce business might be based on the economic value which is the value the data contributes to the company.

How detailed a data set is will also increase the valuation. For example, we work with one client that has daily bank transaction records for each customer and another client that just has email addresses and names. Each data set is valuable, but having daily transaction data can help establish additional commercialisation opportunities. We also provide bespoke data valuation using a propriety machine learning approach.

In addition to data valuation, we offer advice and assistance in the commercialisation of data including the creation of data-based products and the use of data for in-house decision making. Our high-profile data commercialisation team is ready to work with you to assist with valuation and data assets and leveraging them for value. We apply leading valuation techniques, review your data assets and data collection processes, and work with you to turn your data assets into value.