Data: The One Asset Impacting The Valuation Of Growing Businesses

Midsize businesses grow in many ways, such as securing partnership investment, allowing owners and employees to take a vested interest, and securing loans to strengthen operations. The success of these strategies comes down to the company’s valuation, which is measured by the ability to generate revenue, keep customers happy and loyal, and spark and maintain the interest of talented employees and leaders.

Underlying these key factors is an even more critical asset – a strong foundation for collecting, leveraging, and operationalizing data.

According to the IDC infobrief “Becoming a Best-Run Midsize Company: How Growing Companies Benefit from Intelligent Capabilities,” best-run midsize businesses devote significantly more time and energy to every aspect of data management than their lower-performing competitors. These elements include timely availability, company-wide accessibility, trust, completeness, reliability, ease of understanding, overall security, and capability to drive action.

It’s time to treat data as a valuable asset

To stay competitive in an era of unprecedented change, growing companies depend heavily on having a coherent, end-to-end view of operations. Without data, it’s difficult to optimize the entire customer experience, pivot to new business models, take advantage of new productivity opportunities, or increase and maintain workforce engagement.

For example, the IDC infobrief reports that 78.1% of best-run midsize companies are gaining better visibility by connecting and collecting data across different corporate silos to recognize previously unseen patterns. And they are now reaping the benefits by using next-generation, intelligent technologies, such as machine learning, to accelerate their business.

What these companies know is that machine learning is a fantastic opportunity to improve productivity. It can automate complex, repetitive decisions that make up over half of the workload in some business areas. But when such technology fails, it’s because the data is incomplete, inconsistent, or of poor quality.

New data orchestration technologies empower midsize companies to harmonize their data without physically moving it into one place. With a coherent set of data pipelines that connect operational systems, data lakes, and streaming data as and when needed, companies can get a governed view of data without sacrificing data privacy and compliance.

Sound data practices create a virtuous cycle of insight and reinforcement

Consistent data requires investment, but the good news is that there’s never been a better time to start. Analytics technology has finally caught up with business user aspirations, and executives can now get what they’ve been dreaming about for over 40 years: all the information they need to run every aspect of the organization, in real time, at their fingertips.

Companies that create a solid data foundation are now reaping substantial benefits. They can focus on delivering expected outcomes that make the best use of scarce resources and react faster to changing business and market trends. But more importantly, they can raise their valuation to capture the right attention and foster continuous growth.