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Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … are marketplaces finally having their day!?
QUOTES
“Curation of data is crucial, it’s not about any data, it’s about the right data!”
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (The Power of Simplicity)
#1 – Seattle Data Guy posted The State Of Data Engineering - Part 2. January 2023.
My Take: The State of Data Engineering - Part 1 can be found here. I could write a few posts about just this article. This blog shares the results of a pretty extensive survey Seattle Data Guy completed. There is some great feedback here across data catalogs, data observability, ETL/ELT, and other trending topics. Of most interest to me was the data observability/data quality topic. I see this as a foundational issue for anyone working with data. As such, I was surprised to see 45% of respondents having no form of data quality solution (big opportunity for those companies!) & most that are implementing some data quality solution are doing so in-house. Thanks to Seattle Data Guy for pulling this all together ... if you are in the data space, you should be following this SubStack.
#2 – S&P Global published Data monetization on the rise, driven by the most digitally mature enterprises. December 2022.
My Take: Are data marketplaces finally going to have their day? I have been a skeptic of data marketplaces, mostly because I have seen very little traction from the listing of my own products on data marketplaces. Are we finally at an inflection point where buyers & sellers will seamlessly engage via centralized “data marketplace”? The article suggests we are close. There is certainly a lot of interest from both buyer & seller because the current sales cycle for data products has a tremendous amount of friction. I believe the biggest hurdle remains the ability to really understand what the product is, and, frankly, the buyer is just looking to answer a question, so perhaps the best way to address this is for the buyer to be buying the answer to a question (one time or on a regular cadence) irrespective of the data source, as long as the marketplace has vetted compliance & quality. So perhaps the role of the marketplace ultimately evolves into a guarantor of data quality, so the buyer outsources trust to the marketplace.
BONUS: ISI’s Emerging Markets Group published Foresight 2023 Report. January 2023.
“The Foresight highlights how the need for information and data has grown manifold with each subsequent economic crisis, and because of which, policymakers, macroeconomists, and investment professionals are increasingly exploring alternative forms of data to stay abreast of the economic situation.”
BONUS 2: System 2 published Using Alternative Data for Systematic Investing. January 2023. This is a play-by-play of their experience in winning the Eagle Alpha Next Level Hack-a-Thon.
BONUS 3: Related to the data quality article above, BigEye pushes some good content focused on this area, most recently, Jon Hsieh’s Strategies for handling bad data in data pipelines. January 2023.
#1 – Return on India Podcast interviews Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani. December 2022 (h/t to Alex for the recommendation)
My Take: I’d suggest starting this podcast at minute 27. I know very little about India, but this was a wonderful podcast about the strides India has made in a very short period of time getting a huge portion of their population into the digital age. As a result, nearly every citizen now has a “digital history”. This can be a huge benefit to them; how does infrastructure get built so people can use their digital history to improve their lives?
This is a different way of thinking about data … this is not centralized data collection where the consumer is the product (ie Facebook) … but rather empowering the individual with their data asset.
They discuss the Indian data stack: 1- identity, 2- payment, 3- data empowerment. This third “data empowerment layer” allows all citizens to take advantage of their data to improve their lives. Historically data was aggregated by big companies and/or governments … this is shifting to citizen empowerment using data aggregators that are “data access fiduciary” & work for the citizen, not a big company. This “neutral consent manager” works for you, not the big company.
Highlights (41-minute run time):
Minute 27:00 – Every consumer now has a “digital history”
Minute 27:30 – “Indians will be Data rich before they are economically rich”
Minute 28:15 – The “India stack”
Minute 30:00 – “information as collateral”
Minute 31:00 – data aggregator cannot see your data; the aggregator is a “data access fiduciary”
Minute 33:00 – unbundle consent from the consumer of data and unbundle data from user of data
Minute 35:00 – discussion of the impact on the 60m SMEs in India; information collateral at work
Minute 38:30 – impact on supply chains; more competitive open economy with lower costs
Minute 41:00 – how is this organized? “India Stack” is open & designed to create competition
Minute 43:00 – discussion of how India is positioned in the world going forward
Source: Exabel’s Alternative Data for Investment 2023. Exabel completed a survey of 100 investment managers to capture their views on alternative data.
There is a ton of good stuff in this report … the below are just a few of the insights I thought were particularly interesting.
Highlights:
96% of respondents working with alternative data:
Over 1/2 started using alternative data within the past 3 years:
90% see the use of alternative data increasing in the next two years:
Consumer transaction data remains a pillar of any firm’s alternative data strategy:
BONUS: I came across this and thought it was interesting.
This is not my idea … I am not sure who deserves credit … please let me know and I will attached the right credits.
Meanwhile … let’s find those upper right opportunities!
Source: Raconteur’s Why making business decisions is harder than ever. January 2023.
The increased complexity in today’s world has made more valuable the power of simplicity. True genius is being able to describe complex topics simply.
“If you can explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” – Richard Feynman
I get frustrated with the long sales cycles in the data space. There are a lot of reasons for this extended buying arrangement, but I am optimistic that as new tools make it easier to work with & see value in data, the process will shorten.
I am so deeply invested in my own offering that I forget my customers are seeing this with fresh eyes. I can get frustrated when prospects aren’t “getting it” … which is really a direct reflection of my (in)ability to describe “it” simply. Often times, the gatekeeper (my internal “champion”) has to turn around and describe (aka sell) my offering to their internal team. See the above linked Raconteur article for some idea about just how many people get involved in the purchasing decision.
At any step of the way, anyone can simply say, “this is too complex, let’s just focus on some other offering”.
A test of describing 90 West’s offering to someone completely unrelated to my industry can poke holes in your strategy. If my non-data-oriented, non-investor, friend can understand what I am selling, then I am making progress. Often times the questions you get from an unrelated party can open eyes to new opportunities.
But, then again, there is nothing new under the sun … & perhaps it has always been this way:
“It has long been recognized that industrial buying is a complex process. The purchasing decisions are carried out and influenced by many individuals within an organization” Yoram Wind, 1978 Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management
Friday Funnies: