Data Wrapping Can Help Companies Make Better Products

'Data Wrapping' around products and services can help companies improve their offerings to customers according to Barbara Wixom, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. 
A tractor may be "wrapped" with a dashboard to monitor operational performance, a bank account may be "wrapped" with a budgeting tool, a cab trip may be "wrapped" with a fare estimator.
These wraps can create indirect value by, say, increasing customer retention and wallet share or boosting customer satisfaction.In a recent report built around surveys of more than 500 companies, Wixom, along with researchers Killian Farrell – a student in MIT Sloan’s Master of Business Analytics program – and Ronny Schüritz, outlines the fundamentals of generating business value from data wrapping.

What data wrap does:

1)Anticipate by intuiting customer needs. Anticipatory wraps offer predictive and proactive features.
2)Advise through the use of evidence-based decision making. Wraps with advisory features provide data and insights that inform a customer’s decisions.
3)Adapt by meeting customer needs in a tailored way across different environments and contexts.
4) Act, which means that the wrap performs an action to benefit the customer. Wraps that act are integrated into customer processes or behaviors, or they trigger behavior automatically on the customer’s behalf. For example, a bank app that automatically transfers funds to help a customer avoid overdraft fees.