If You Have Data, You Have a Product. Innovate And Commercialize Your Data With These 5 Steps.

Approximately 328 million terabytes of data are generated each day. As such, there’s growing demand for products that analyze, interpret, and deliver data in a user-friendly way.

For information services companies, your data isn’t just an asset. It’s a product—or, more accurately, it has the potential to become a product.

If you can build a digital platform that uses the data to perform valuable insights to your core customers, you can move beyond raw spreadsheets into a revenue-generating solution. This can include:

• Provide information to help customers make better decisions
• Clue customers into “blind spots” based on data-driven insights
• Personalize features & functionality based on predictive analytics
• Power customer’s software capabilities through an API

To build a digital platform that addresses those needs—and others—requires more than just “plug and play” development. It requires modern technology infrastructure that can grow and adapt to evolving consumer needs.

More importantly, it involves a changed mindset among your team. Rather than think of yourselves as a “data provider,” you need to start thinking like an agile software company—and form necessary strategic partnerships to make that happen.

5 essential steps to turn your data into a fully fledged product

3Pillar Global uses this five-stage framework to create a customized approach for every platform modernization effort based on your strategy. We’ve developed this framework based on best practices from hundreds of modernization engagements, including B2B platforms, APIs, advanced data pipelines, and more.

Our strategic approach blends mindset with your business strategy and product roadmap to deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients. Here are the five steps we follow.

1. Identify goals & develop strategy: it’s not about the technology

Before we start developing any technology, it’s important to gain clarity on your company’s strategic goals and objectives. This ensures that the end product actually serves your needs.

Using those goals as a lens, we explore everything about your strategy, product vision, product mix & roadmap, and desired customer experience. Through this exploration, we can identify the technology capabilities that align with your product vision and demonstrated customer needs.

At the end of this step, we identify an architectural target state and guiding principles. That way, everyone has a clear idea of how to work, dependencies, key activities, and the target state vision to achieve your goals.

2. Establish a vision & deliver value incrementally

Too many platform modernization projects languish because developers try to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

Instead, we prioritize your roadmap to deliver quick, impactful wins. Once you start seeing those wins, we deliver value incrementally in an agile approach.

Incremental change leads to greater efficiencies and better results than taking an all-or-nothing approach to modernizing your platforms. Despite many people thinking “big bang” modernizations are the only path towards the future, this approach of sweeping change is high risk, expensive, and prone to failure.

So we take a more incremental and sustainable strategy toward platform modernization. Over time, we’ll add new features that align with your strategy and market needs.

3. Create an empowered team with a product mindset

Digital transformation is as much about developing a new mindset as it is about creating technological changes. Your platform modernization strategy must factor in the necessary cultural shifts as well.

It’s important to change your priorities to better fit a modern digital product mindset. This includes:

• Clearly identifying your strategy and goals
• Identifying problems and solving them creatively
• Striving for continuous improvement and incremental delivery
• Developing a lean, agile organization that can adapt quickly to the changing marketplace
• Accelerating innovation that provides value for your customers

To that end, your product and technology team must commit to fostering a mindset of growth and problem-solving. This involves two motions. First, identify existing team members with the right mindset to support modernization efforts. Second, where there are gaps, fill them with experts and strategic partners.

4. Create roadmap & timeline

Armed with the priorities, approach, and team, it’s time to create a platform modernization roadmap and timeline.

To shorten your timeline, minimize time to value, and accelerate your wins, we recommend that your platform modernization strategy factors in:

• Platforms that must be migrated together. Some systems are dependent on one another. Your minimum viable modernization efforts may include one top-priority feature and a second that’s lower on the list yet essential to optimizing the process.
• “Side effects” on company culture. We’ve identified that change requires effort, training, and mindset shifts. All of which are important. However, it also frees up your team’s energy to focus on higher priorities that allow them to utilize their strengths and deliver greater value to customers.
• Effects and progress each step makes towards goals. When you’re in the middle of a process, it’s not always easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Defining each step’s exit criteria and contribution to the larger objective helps generate buy-in among your team.

5. Implement, test, & launch

Now it’s “go time.” Based on your goals, the approach we’re outlining here, and the resulting platform modernization strategy, it’s time to put the plan into action.

After rigorous testing and ongoing training with your team, we turn things over to you to keep the engine moving, so you can deliver value to your customers. With access to powerful resources and information, your team can continue innovating toward your goals.

At 3Pillar Global, we believe in continually making progress with successive wins. Ultimately, this mindset empowers you to continue on a path of excelling at change, minimizing time to value, and solving for customer need while building trust and credibility internally.

Data commercialization: a core component of digital transformation

As our world becomes increasingly digital, information services companies that rely on outdated practices and legacy technology will get left behind.

Now is the time to explore how you can leverage the data at your disposal not just as an internal asset, but as a revenue-generating product.

A powerful strategy for growth accelerates innovation within your company, strengthens consistency and stability, and empowers better decision-making. In the best cases, it helps your people go from “We’ve always done it this way” to “Imagine all the possibilities!”

3Pillar Global is here to help you build strategy, shift your cultural mindset, and build modern data products for an evolving market. Contact us today to speak with a 3Pillar expert.