I am looking forward to visiting Cork next week to present to the IT@Cork community.
One of the reasons for my visit is to discuss the topics of "Data Value" and "Data Valuation" for the first time. For years corporations have been restructuring their people, processes, and infrastructure to extract monetary value out of data. New Big Data and Analytic infrastructures are a result of this restructuring. What I plan to talk about is related to this trend. There are more and more use cases in which corporations are assigning and monitoring the economic value of their data sets in an ongoing fashion.
So the question I intend to discuss involves an examination of whether or not these new infrastructures can facilitate ongoing data valuation (in addition to continual data analytics).
One of the key use cases that I hope to focus on is that of data insurance. There are a growing number of companies that will underwrite policies to insure corporations against data loss. These data insurers run the gamut from large, established insurance companies to smaller startups. Similarly, the companies being insured also run the gamut from multi-national corporations to small startups.
In 2014 there were signs that data insurance use cases were on the rise. Many of the data insurance scenarios were related to data breaches. Local to my geography, for example, there was a Boston Globe article which highlighted the growing trend of data insurance in response to data breaches.
One local hospital had a breach involving 800,000 patient records, and the hospital ended up paying a settlement of $750,000 dollars. This equates to an economic value of roughly $1 dollar per patient record for the settlement.
What other economic value does (or did) this data have? Who assigns economic value? How does a company organize its people for valuation?
And more importantly (from my point of view), how can the IT Infrastructure be best organized to support data valuation?
In order to answer many of these questions, my company (EMC) has teamed with University of California San Diego researcher Dr. Jim Short to explore "all things data value". Jim is the Research Director for the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC).
One of my goals for the trip to the IT community in Cork is to share some of his initial research and translate the results into my own opinions about how IT infrastructure can best be deployed to support valuation.
In the days before my visit I plan on sharing a bit more context about this topic on this site. I also look forward to discovering potential research partners that have interest in collaborating on this topic.
Perhaps a trip to sunny San Diego is in your future. As for me this sounds good as we are up to about 30 inches of snow here in Massachusetts!
Steve
EMC Fellow
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