Our freight and transportation company client was doing several things right on the data front. And although they were making some smart business decisions related to data, our client believed it could do even more. The company wanted to get ahead of its industry peers in optimizing business data and put a value on its data. So, they contacted First San Francisco Partners (FSFP) for help.
About
Industry: Freight and transportation
Background: Our client already had a data strategy when FSFP first met them, had invested heavily in an IT upgrade and had more than 20 data scientists on staff. The company contacted us about measuring its data assets, which included a data lake and data warehouse with enormous amounts of data (event, transaction, customer, truck, partner, etc.) to see if they were getting maximum value from the data.
Engagement Type
- Data valuation and data literacy assessments
Opportunity Areas
- Data-related costs (technology, resources, etc.) and the total cost of ownership would soon outpace the value the company could deliver from its data assets.
- Data governance plan was in place, but those responsible for governance were still trying to gain traction and deepen governance’s influence across the company.
- Data literacy was spotty throughout the company and even among the large data scientist team. This literacy disconnect caused a large swath of the organization not to be as data-driven as the company hoped for.
- Data scientists needed to better understand and communicate the value of their work.
Engagement Snapshot
- Review current business strategy and all data-related initiatives.
- Assess the organization’s data literacy with a high-level survey.
- Value the company data, including:
- Economic value – Notional calculation of potential internal and external benefits
- Cost value – Actual cost to get environment running
- Benchmarking – Comparison of available business benchmarks
- Present findings and recommendations to company leadership throughout the engagement.
Impact
- FSFP offered clear, pragmatic action items for the data governance organization to implement to get the momentum our client had been missing.
- We recommended key change management action steps, including data literacy training, designed to sustain the data-driven gains and improve the business’ decision-making processes related to its data.
- Our data valuation assessment:
- Examined the cost of the company’s data assets and the ROI for existing data initiatives.
- Revealed new revenue sources and gains the company was previously unaware of.
- Generated two data value numbers, with one demonstrating the current and future value of the company’s data portfolio if it maintained its current course — and another, much-higher number based on the company’s data portfolio value if the client adopted our recommendations.
- FSFP provided the company with benchmarks, comparing its data asset environment to freight and transportation industry competitors, so the client could see if its data investments and assets were competitive.
