Large, highly valuable yet unwieldy datasets are common in the B2B information space.
Publishers make good money selling PDF-based reports, but are increasingly finding opportunities to fully realise the value of their data stymied by the unstructured way in which the data is held.
Companies like Infopro Digital are therefore going down the data transformation route, merging their data assets into a single repository, granularizing it, automating and standardizing all inputs and incorporating intuitive query and extraction tools. Once the data has been made fully accessible, the publisher will then be able to craft a range of exciting new product offerings.
A few weeks ago, I was interviewing Tom Lake, product and technology director at Infopro Digital and Will Bailey, head of partnerships at 67 Bricks, a technology consultancy and product development team, who are managing a data transformation project at Infopro Digital, for a sponsored article in the May / June issue of InPublishing magazine (not on the mailing list? Register here).
What, I asked them, was the secret of delivering a successful data transformation project? I came away with five bits of advice:
- Bring in help. Publisher IT teams are busy. They have regular day-to-day responsibilities and are unlikely to have the capacity or skillsets to manage such a project. You will need to get expert help; Infopro Digital got 67 Bricks.
- Brief them, but not too tightly. You need to give your agency a good idea of your direction of travel, where you want to get to and the challenges you face, but don’t be too prescriptive. Give them the leeway to offer up solutions and fresh thinking.
- Include your in-house tech team in the process. Brief them on what is happening and why, consult them and involve them along the way. That way, you get their buy-in and avoid nasty surprises.
- Make the solution AI-enabled. As you’ve probably noticed, we live in an AI world. Your teams and your customers expect interactivity and to be able conduct semantic natural language search.
- Realise value early; avoid the big unveil. Don’t beaver away in the corner, creating a big monolithic structure that won’t see the light of day until the go-live date. Show progress early, get people working on it and seeing the benefits, get feedback and calibrate accordingly. It’s important to iterate and stay agile.
Their current project, involving Infopro Digital’s Chartis division, is nearing completion. According to Tom, the next steps are rolling out the learnings to other Infopro Digital divisions and “getting to work on developing some really valuable products for our customers”.
That’s what it’s all about – realising exciting growth opportunities.
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
