How to Win New Business with External Data

Increasingly, external data (alternative data, public data, open data – call it what you want) is being called the "secret sauce" of driving advanced analytics, developing machine learning and AI capabilities, enriching existing models, and delivering unrealized insights to every part of your organization. The difficulty in connecting to this data is top of mind for many businesses, and the issue of governing its use is crystallizing into a core strategy among organizations that have seen the GDPR's writing on the wall. For the moment, put aside the slightly fevered predictions about delivering artificial intelligence across the enterprise with a few datasets and a new CDO (setting up an external data strategy relies as much on culture as it does on data). It's important to acknowledge that for many organizations, external data should be approached not as a replacement for what's already working, but as an enhancement to what you've got today. Regardless of where an organization is on their journey towards being data-driven, the chances are good that data, in some form or another, is already hardwired into their architecture.