Why Data Access is the Heart of a Competitive Business

- Alan Jamieson, VP of Business Development at BOHH Labs

Businesses are evolving and starting to quickly realize that the data they retain has value to the company, but only if they can leverage it.  In fact, by 2020, some global analysts predict that data will be listed as a company asset, so it has significant monetary value. 

Some businesses already have a data-driven strategy that leverages its rich customer data assets to look for new revenues streams, business opportunities or use its machine performance data to improve efficiency through fewer machine breakdowns or to ensure that production is at its highest level that is already giving them competitive advantage.

Let’s reflect on Fortune 1000 companies over the last decade. Globally, our traditional Fortune 1000 companies are changing, and a significant percentage have fallen off the global stock markets or ceased trading, due to competition from newer entrants.  New online banks have set up business and are winning business from global banking organizations, as they offer more cost-effective services and are better able to understand their customers. New banking companies are looking for customers to use them for multiple services and customers, especially the younger generation, who expect more convenient and real-time 24-7 answers. Why does this matter?  Customer experience is a key business matrix. How customers interact and access their data is important for all parties and traditional banks are not always of the same thinking, or importantly, don’t have the technical systems to know their customer.  Additionally, newly formed companies don’t have legacy infrastructure to consider and are often more agile in their approach.

The greater knowledge businesses have access to through real-time interactions and many years of customer engagement, the greater analytical visibility they can gain on their customer or business operations, which helps make informed decisions on how you can extend or develop that relationship through new services and products.

It’s clear our global use of digital technologies, both in our consumer and work lives, is helping companies get more data on customers/users and their behaviors. The business world is starting to analyze those large volumes of data to drive greater customer and business insight. However, in our increasingly connected world, the variety of data – compliant, sensitive and confidential, plus the volume of data that is being produced, available, and perhaps more importantly, collected, is impacting and challenging many global companies. Data breaches are still occurring on a frequent basis and are a key security consideration in how data is accessed and protected today.

To handle today’s influx of structured and unstructured data, businesses use real-time data warehouses and often archive or store data over 12 months old to reduce its storage or operational costs. While data volumes are growing annually, the overall mix of data types creates the biggest challenge. How do you ensure that authorized users can access sensitive information like pricing, compliant data like Personal Identify Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI) and confidential corporate data, but other business users can do analytics on the overall dataset without seeing the protected data?

BOHH Labs has developed a solution that enables businesses to keep data access at the heart of driving competitive business with our Secure Data as a Service acting as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data, enabling total security on all your stored data. This helps to protect only the compliant or sensitive data fields that can only be accessed by specific users, while importantly enabling a wider business community of users to access the data for analytical purposes.  Making decisions using greater sets of data, helps to make more informed decisions through analytics. Secondly, as our service includes a secure conversational bot, we help companies who have an interest in customer self-service initiatives. Customers securely access data and authenticate through existing applications to access their specific information using voice as opposed to a keyboard, which improves user’s experience, customer services and drive competitive advantage.