What’s in a Definition?
In order to monetize your organization’s data, first, start with a financial plan that considers the cost of inaction. For an example of what inaction might look like, let’s use General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
GDPR calls for a high level of organizational maturity, with privacy that needs to be embedded into the culture of the organization at the business process level. Why is this important? Because there are 99 articles and 11 capabilities areas for GDPR data compliance that you’ll need to be aware of and compliant with. In order to ascertain your current level of compliance, you’ll need a comprehensive view of the data ecosystem or an assessment of the whole Enterprise Architecture.
Pro Tip: You can bypass traditional data analysis that would only seek to understand the data and risks at a data source and use level, and proceed to have a good GDPR assessment that will provide you with an understanding of the level of governance and risk within your organization.
Now that you have some information in your hands, it’s time to make some decisions to start building your data monetization journey. Continuing to use GDPR as your guinea pig, you have a choice to make: Do nothing and guess what will happen on May 26, 2018, or move forward with your GDPR preparation.
Why Hedging Your Bets is a Bad Idea
You could hedge your bets and take a risk, but think about that for a moment. This regulation is going to go into effect whether you want it to or not. What are the ramifications of a do-nothing decision? Fines are to be expected, but how much are we talking about? What other impacts will there be to your organization? And will your organization be able to survive it?
Instead, you can consider this as an opportunity. Your organization can use GDPR to establish a governance model that actually has executive sponsorship and funding. Be able to connect IT and the business for the first time in a tangible revenue focused value stream with a specific corporate objective. You might even find that the benefits of complying with GDPR far outweigh the actual intent in the broader scheme of things.
Top 9 Positive Outcomes of GDPR Compliance Activities
So what are the broader applications you could apply this GDPR exercise towards? Here are the top nine positive ancillary outcomes of GDPR compliance activities for top-down, bottom-up and middle-out strategic and tactical activities:
- 1. Increased sales and pipeline generation. Faster close cycles with better data.
- 2. Line of sight into your data. Market to the right people with the right offers.
- 3. Crystal clean data – Speaks for itself.
- 4. The end to wasted efforts on outdated and inaccurate lists by irresponsible third parties vendors.
- 5. Improved customer relationships and increased targeted sales.
- 6. Intangible goodwill. You won’t necessarily see these dollars in the sales cycle but they are there!
- 7. Better security and partner/vendor relationships.
- 8. Higher margins. Faster qualified-to-closed sales cycle.
- 9. Truly qualified upside.
For Example: Let’s say you have an external application with integration that moves your leads over to SalesForce. There are a number of workflows set up to keep the information moving, however, in many cases, it is difficult to determine who may be on the “do not email me” list when prospecting. Time is money and one shouldn’t waste it on validating prospects to generate pipeline. As part of becoming GDPR compliant, you’ve done the foundational work and can apply that towards speeding up your sales cycle.
To effectively monetize your data you need to understand the pillars of governance and where to begin and end. With GDPR compliance, you’ve already done the legwork and now it’s easy to extend the work you did there to all parts of the organization to reduce time and costs of other projects and report accurately on your business processes.
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