Opportunity Discovery
1. Opportunity Discovery
There is a lot to digest from the last section, but we must continue. I’ll start with the construct that our products are no longer coded; they're generated. So, instead of focusing on the code, we must focus on the data itself. That's also true for opportunity discovery.2. Getting started
During opportunity discovery, we work to find opportunities to create and deliver value to customers. The framework has a strong connection with the data the business has access to. Thinking about our products being generated, not coded, changes the cost equation. We must evaluate the cost of the coding, and the cost of generating the data that will feed the model or analytics and deliver value. The lower the data generation costs the better. Margins will be higher, but we have some other considerations involved. I'll get into more detail about those details in Section 3.3. Two sides
Finding opportunities is a 2-sided problem. We often dive headfirst into opportunity discovery and that’s a mistake. The opportunities that are right in front of us are assumed to be the opportunities that are right for us, but that's not the case. We have to go out and find high-value opportunities that may not be obvious so we can turn those into initiatives and products that will create and deliver value for customers. Opportunity discovery is critical, and it's connected to the data-generating processes. What are data-generating processes? Everything the business can access could be a data-generating process and lead to a high-value product. Access to data creates the opportunity.4. Data access
First, access to data-generating processes is critical. Identifying data-generating processes helps businesses define opportunities to create and deliver value with data, analytics, and advanced models. What generates data? Employees doing work. Customers using products. Experiments. As I’ll discuss later, platforms generate data natively. However, we don't always have a good way of gathering data that is being generated. Think about someone driving a car that isn't connected to any Internet or mobile connectivity solution. The business has no way of getting data about how that customer uses our product from the car. As a result, even though the business has access to the data-generating process, it has no opportunities to create and deliver value with data, analytics, and models for those workflows.5. Data dynamics: internal innovation
The same concept applies to internal products. All processes and workflows generate data, but the business doesn't have access to that data if there's no technology solution in place. As a result, the business can't create or deliver value to internal users in that part of the workflow. Looking for opportunities with this framework changes the way we approach opportunity discovery. Obviously, we can't deliver a solution if we don't have data. But how do we know, if the business has data or how much it would cost to get access to data? We answer that question by defining what generates data for the business right now and what data it is capturing today.6. Empowering the business
It's essential to think about data generation as giving businesses the power to control value creation. Access to data-generating processes creates customer and business context. I'll explain that in detail in Section 3 and discuss how those reduce the cost of model training.7. Transitioning
If we don't have access to business and customer context, models can't learn the more complex patterns that represent domain knowledge. Domain knowledge is critical. That is a summary of the product side and a teaser of what’s to come in the next section. For opportunity discovery, the business's best, most valuable opportunities align with access to a data-generating process where technology is in place today to capture that data. If you remember that, opportunity discovery is a much simpler process. Finding hidden, high-value opportunities is a more straightforward process. The business transitions from chasing opportunities that are right in front of it to discovering opportunities that are right for it.8. Let's practice!
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