Data monetization is about harvesting direct financial results from having access to data that is stored, maintained, categorized and made accessible in an optimal manner. Traditionally data management & analytics has contributed indirectly to financial outcome by aiming at keeping data fit for purpose in the various business processes that produced value to the business. Today the best performers are using data much more directly to create new services and business models.

There are three ways of exploiting data monetization:

• Selling data: This is something that have been known to the data management world for years. Notable examples are the likes of Dun & Bradstreet who is selling business directory data. Another example is postal services around the world selling their address directories. This is the kind of data we know as third party data.
• Wrapping data around products: If you have a product – or a service – you can add tremendous value to these products and services and make them more sellable by wrapping data, potentially including third party data, around those products and services. These data will thus become second party at trading partners.
• Advanced analytics and decision making: You can combine third party data, second party data and first party data (your own data) in order to make advanced analytics and fast operational decision making in order to sell more, reduce costs and mitigate risks.

Master Data Management (MDM) is the core foundation for ensuring the multipurpose data quality of the data you sell, purchase from a third-party provider, push to trading partners, pull from trading partners and use in analytics and decision making. Product Information Management (PIM) is crucial when wrapping data around products and Product Data Syndication is essential when linking the data between trading partners.

On this site there is a list of forward-looking MDM, PIM and Product Data Syndication vendors who can enable your data monetization efforts. Find the list here.