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Your Organization Needs a Proprietary Data Strategy

Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas C. Redman

Protect your competitive advantage.

Companies need to be more focused on proprietary data — data that is unique to a company and can be used to create a sustainable competitive advantage. The need for proprietary data strategies is increasing with new data types and the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). Most commercial AI involves machine learning, and if your company has the same data as everyone else, it will have the same models informing these machines, and thus no competitive advantage. A company’s proprietary data strategy should address the full lifecycle of such data — from what might be done with it, to how to get it, to the ethical considerations that might result from it. Beyond simply appreciating the need for such data, a strategy effort can answer key questions about how proprietary data fits into the strategy and business models of an organization.

What’s the most overlooked piece of your company’s data strategy? If you’re like many companies, it’s probably proprietary data — data that is unique to a company and can be used to create a sustainable competitive advantage. This is not to mean trade secrets and intellectual property (which is often proprietary but seldom really data), but rather, data where the company is the only organization that has it, or it has added enough value to make it a unique business asset. Proprietary data can be big or small, structured or unstructured, raw or refined. What’s important is that it is not easily replicated by another entity. That’s what makes it a powerful means of achieving offensive value from data management.

Thomas H. Davenport is the Bodily Bicentennial Professor of Analytics at the UVA Darden School of Business, a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Program.
Thomas C. Redman , “the Data Doc,” is President of Data Quality Solutions . He helps companies and people chart their courses to data-driven futures with special emphasis on quality, analytics, and organizational capabilities. His latest book, People and Data: Uniting to Transform Your Organization (Kogan Page) was published Summer 2023.