The first mental roadblock to monetizing information is a failure to think beyond selling it. Painting yourself or your organization into that corner limits the economic potential of your information. Instead, think more broadly about the broad brush methods utilized to generate profit. The trend to see and use information as an asset is still in the early adoption phase, making doing so a competitive differentiator for leading organizations. But even where organizations have embraced this idea, there's an array of challenges to transform the idea of value into a reality that benefits the organization. Information has economic value that you can turn into money in two essential ways. First, by exchanging it for goods, services, or cash. Second, by using it to drive revenue or reduce expenses or risks. Yet most information and business leaders lack the experience and tools to monetize information. Why? Perhaps we have a collective mental block due to the value of information itself being largely unrecognized on the balance sheet, as we've previously discussed, even as the value of other intangibles, such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents are measured and reported. Let's get to the point. What are the ways we can generate benefits from information? Economic benefits, ones that we can actually measure. Numerous examples we'll discuss, highlight that every business is, can be, or should be in the information business, monetizing information in a spectrum of ways. According to the Capgemini EMC big data report, 63% of respondents consider that the monetization of data could eventually become as valuable to their organizations as their existing products and services. But consider that a recent Gartner survey indicates that fewer than 20% of organizations are either licensing or exchanging their information for goods and services from others, and a scant 31% are even measuring the economic benefits of using their information assets themselves. Even if your information won't ever become as valuable as your existing products or services, it's unconscionable to forego an opportunity to monetize it in one or more ways. Whether it's getting into digital business, or digitizing your offerings, licensing your data to suppliers or partners, baking your information assets into existing products or services to extend their value, or measuring and leveraging the economic benefits of deploying information internally, you better get your organization into the information business or suffer the consequences of becoming a footnote in the information age. Now the reasons to monetize data are quite varied. The following drivers of data monetization should be more than enough to help you craft a business case to do so. In the next lesson, we'll have a closer look at each of these. The first, using information to grow your business, and you can do this by increasing customer acquisition or retention, by creating a brand new revenue stream, by introducing a new line of business or figuring out how to use information to enter new markets, or enabling competitive differentiation, or you can use information as a form of currency itself by bartering with it. Bartering either in return for goods and services or bartering for favorable terms and conditions and relationships. Again, in the next lesson, we'll look at some details on these. Then finally, you can use information to reduce expenses and risks. You can use it to offset information-related expenses from say your IT department, or you can identify and reduce fraud and risk thereby saving expenses that way, or you can improve the well-being of citizens, and customers, and employees. You notice I mentioned citizens there as well. Monetization isn't just for commercial businesses. Data monetization, as we've expressed, it can also include opportunities for public sector organizations.
