The Metamorphosis from Data Services to Information Services and Analytics

1. I’ve been arguing for a while that data and
information companies will become analytics and
insight companies. Someone reminded me recently
of something that I wrote in 2007 (in the book
“Competing on Analytics”, co-authored with
Jeanne Harris):
“As more firms become aware
of the possibilities for analytical
competition, they will push the
boundaries of analytics in their
products, services, and business
models. Virtually every provider
of data and information services,
for example, will probably offer analytics to its
customers as a value-added service. Data itself has
become something of a commodity, and customers
for data often can’t find the time or people to analyze
it for themselves.”
OK, I may have been a little overly optimistic on
this prediction (note I did use the wishy-washy
“probably” term), but I think I was directionally
correct. I frequently hear of data providers that
are attempting to become analytics and insight
providers to their customers.
I recently spoke to customers of a company called
Neustar Inc., a relatively new company, being spun
out of Lockheed-Martin in 1999, and going public in
2005. I met Neustar’s CEO Lisa Hook at a conference,
and interviewed her after it. It’s clear that she gets
the idea of moving the company from a data and
transactions business to an insights and analytics
business, and she’s overseen substantial progress
in that regard.
Not that Neustar doesn’t manage some important
data and transactions. Got a phone number in North
America? Neustar keeps track of it as administrator
of the North American Numbering Plan and number
portability. The company looks after 1.5 billion
telephone numbers, and makes over a million
changes a day to the data. Got a .biz or .us or .cn
Internet address? Neustar keeps track of it. Got a
GSM phone? Neustar helps route your calls and text
messages on it. Despite all the important data, these
systems have never had a security breach.
But when Ms. Hook became CEO in 2010, she
realized that the company could only go so far on
telecom services. She wanted to transition the
company into one also focused on providing data,
insights, and services outside of telecom. It got a
start on the latter objective by getting the contract
with the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem to
provide the service behind the UltraViolet streaming
content standard.
From Selling Information to
Selling Insight
July 10, 2013, 2:49 PM ET
Thomas H. Davenport
Guest Contributor

2. And Neustar’s customers began to ask for data
services and customer insights based on the
information they already had about their customers.
Telecom firms wondered what their own data told
them about whether a particular customer was likely
to skip out on paying his bill and should therefore be
monitored more closely to avoid defaulting. Cable
services firms wanted insights on the likelihood
that a customer would be interested in upgrading to
a triple-play package. Others wanted information
about how to communicate with their customers
more effectively. Ms. Hook saw a clear and growing
demand for insights and analytics.
However, the company culture was oriented to
transactions and secure systems management, not
to generating insights about customers. As Ms. Hook
looked around her employee base, she saw a lot of
people who could build and run huge, authoritative
databases, and very few people with a data science
or analytics background.
The answer to this skill shortage was right down the
street from Neustar in Northern Virginia. TARGUSInfo
was a company with a similar focus on telecom that
had already made the shift to a marketing analytics
orientation. They understood the entire marketing
process, from lead generation to retention, and
could offer their customers assistance in it. They
had a very similar financial profile to Neustar, so
Neustar acquired them in October 2011.
The acquisition has worked out very well.
TARGUSInfo already had a development process
for data-driven products and services—a catalog
of available data, governance, provenance, and
permissible uses—and now Neustar is building
one too. Neustar had lots of unstructured data—
now housed in Hadoop clusters—and is exploring
it to find out how best to turn it into products. To
aid in this process, Neustar put a number of data
scientists into a newly-created Neustar Labs at the
University of Illinois.
I asked Ms. Hook about their product development
process—whether they started with their data and
tried to find out what was of value in it, or started
with their customer’s needs and tried to find a
solution in their data. It wasn’t a quiz, but she gave
what I consider the right answer: “Both.”
Now Neustar has a well-developed platform
for extracting consumer insights from data and
presenting highly targeted offers to them. The
company has defined 232 consumer segments. If
you call one of their customers, Neustar will figure
out who you are within 100 milliseconds and what
segment you belong in, and then help determine
which offer for one of the customer’s products
and services to present to you. Using this approach
increases conversions over non-targeted offers
between 10 and 50%.
Every company that maintains or sells data should
be thinking along these lines. The information you
have is only useful if a customer can turn it into
something valuable. You know your data and how to
make it more useful, so you should be thinking about
what analytics and insights you can provide. You may
think you’re in the data business, but you should be
in the data-derived insights business.
Thomas H. Davenport is a Visiting Professor at
Harvard Business School, a Distinguished Professor
at Babson College, Director of Research at the
International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior
Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.